Just One Evil Act

12 May

BELGRAVIA

LONDON

The fact that Isabelle Ardery had made no move to deal with Barbara Havers suggested to Lynley that she was either giving him the time he had asked for to try to sort out what Barbara had been up to or she was herself building a case against Barbara that would give her the result she’d been looking for since first encountering the sergeant as a difficult member of her team. Isabelle was someone who wanted things to run smoothly, and it couldn’t be argued that Barbara lent to the machinery of a police investigation the constant oil of her cooperation.

Isabelle had, of course, asked for a report from him. He told her of his conversation with Bryan Smythe, but he made no mention of either the airline tickets to Lahore or what Barbara Havers had asked Smythe to do. He left out the information that she had gone to see Smythe in the company of Azhar as well. This proved to be a misstep on his part.

Isabelle slid the report across her desk to him. He put on his glasses, opened it, and read.

John Stewart had been on top of the call upon Bryan Smythe made by Havers and Azhar. He’d merely not had a chance to hand it over to Isabelle when Lynley and she had met earlier with the sergeant. When Lynley asked the superintendent why she had not yet turned Barbara over to CIB, her steady reply of “I’m waiting to see how far this reaches” told him that his own actions would be scrutinised as well.

“Isabelle, I admit that I’m trying to find excuses for her” was what he told the superintendent.

“Looking for reasons is understandable, Tommy. Looking for excuses is not. I expect you see the difference between the two.”

He returned Stewart’s report to her, saying, “And as for John . . . his reasons? His excuses? What are you planning to do about him?”

“John’s well in hand. You’re not to concern yourself with John.”

He could hardly believe what she was saying since it had to mean she’d actually set DI Stewart to the task of watching Havers closely and noting her movements. If that was the case, Isabelle was giving Barbara rope. She also was telling him not to wrest that rope from Barbara’s grasp only to wrap it round his own neck.

All that was wanted to finish Barbara off was Lynley’s own report on the full contents of the conversation he’d had with Bryan Smythe. For although Stewart knew where Barbara had gone and when she’d gone there and with whom, what he had not known from the first was what she was up to. Only Lynley himself—and Barbara—knew that.

Early in the morning, he went into the garden behind his house. His place was laid for breakfast, his newspapers were on the dining room table precisely angled from his fork, and the scent of bread toasting under Charlie Denton’s watchful eye was emanating from the kitchen. But he walked to the window, looked out on the bright spring day, and saw how beautifully the roses were blooming. He went outside to look them over, aware that in the time since Helen’s death, he’d not once ventured out into the garden she’d loved. Nor, he realised, had anyone else.

Among the rose bushes he found a pail. Within it pruned branches from the plants leaned. Hooked over the pail’s side was a small pair of secateurs, rusty now from being exposed to the weather for more than a year. The bushes themselves told the tale of why the pail, its contents, and the secateurs had been left out here for so long. Helen had been in the midst of pruning them when she’d been murdered.

Lynley thought of how he’d watched her once from the window of his library above stairs. He’d gone to join her in the garden and even now her words came to him, spoken in her typical self-deprecating, droll fashion. Tommy darling, I do think this might be the only useful activity I could possibly become adept at. There’s something so satisfying about grubbing round in the dirt. I think it takes one back to one’s roots. And then she thought about what she’d said and laughed. What a terrible pun. It was completely unintentional.

He’d offered to help her, but she wouldn’t let him. Don’t please rob me of my one opportunity to excel at something.

He smiled now at the thought of her. Then he was struck by how the thought of Helen had for the first time not been accompanied by searing pain.

A door opened behind him. He turned to see Denton opening it for Barbara Havers. Seeing her, Lynley glanced at his watch. It was seven twenty-eight in the morning. What on earth was she doing in Belgravia? he wondered.

She crossed the lawn to him. She looked horrible. Not only was she more thrown together than usual, but she also seemed to have spent an entire night without sleep. She said to him, “They have Azhar.”

He blinked. “Who?”

“The cops in Lucca. They’ve taken his passport. He’s being detained. He doesn’t know why.”

“Is he being questioned about something?”

“Not yet. He just can’t leave Italy. He doesn’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what’s going on. So how do I help him? I didn’t know what else to do. I don’t speak Italian. I don’t know their game. I don’t know what’s happened.” She took three paces along the flowerbeds before she swung round and said abruptly, “C’n you ring them, sir? C’n you find out what’s happening?”

“If they’re detaining him, it’s obviously because they’ve got questions about—”

“Look. Right. Whatever. I know. For what it’s worth, I’ve told him to ring the embassy. And to get a solicitor, just in case. I’ve told him that. But there must be something more I c’n do. And you know these blokes and you c’n speak Italian and you c’n at least . . .” She punched a fist into her palm. “Please, sir. Please. It’s why I’ve come from Chalk Farm. It’s why I couldn’t wait till you got to work. Please.”

He said, “Come with me,” and took her to the house. Inside the dining room, he saw that Denton was already laying another place for breakfast. Lynley thanked him, poured two cups of coffee, and told Barbara to serve herself some eggs and bacon from the sideboard.

“Already eaten,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“Chocolate Pop-Tart and a fag.” She cocked her head at the sideboard and added, “Anything nutritious’ll probably put my system into shock.”

“Humour me,” he told her. “I don’t wish to eat alone.”

“Sir, please . . . I need you to . . .”

“I’m completely aware of that, Barbara,” he said steadily.

Reluctantly, she spooned herself some scrambled eggs. She added to this two rashers of bacon. She got into the spirit of things with four mushrooms and a piece of toast. He followed her lead and then joined her at the table.

She said with a nod to his newspapers, “How d’you read three bloody broadsheets every morning, for God’s sake?”

“I take the news from The Times and the editorials from The Guardian and The Independent.”

“Seeking balance in life?”

“I find it’s wise to do so. The overuse of adverbs in journalism these days is becoming something of a distraction, though. I don’t like to be told what to think, even surreptitiously.”

They locked eyes at this. She broke away first, scooping up some of her scrambled eggs and piling them up on a portion torn from her toast. She chewed quite a bit. Swallowing, however, did not appear easy for her.

Lynley said, “Before I make the call to Inspector Lo Bianco, Barbara . . . ?” He waited for her gaze to meet his. “Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything I need to know?”

She shook her head.

“You’re certain?” he said.

“Far ’s I know,” she told him.

So be it, he thought.

BELGRAVIA

LONDON

For the first time in her life, Barbara Havers cursed the fact that she had no language other than English. While it was true that she’d had moments of desire to learn a foreign tongue—most of them having to do with understanding what the cook at her local curry house was really yelling about the lamb rogan josh before he slopped it into a takeaway container—for the great majority of her life she’d had no need of one. She had a passport, but she’d never used it to go anywhere a foreign tongue was spoken. She’d never used it at all, in fact. She only had it on the off chance that a heretofore unknown Prince Charming might show up unexpectedly in her life and wish to take her on a luxury Mediterranean holiday in the sun.

But now, watching Lynley as he spoke to Chief Inspector Lo Bianco in Lucca, she tried to pick up anything she could. She listened hard for words she might recognise. She tried to read his face. From the words, she only picked up names: Azhar, Lorenzo Mura, Santa Zita—whoever the hell that was—and Fanucci. She thought she also heard Michelangelo Di Massimo mentioned as well as information, hospital, and factory, for some reason. Most of what she learned came from Lynley’s face, which grew graver as the conversation continued.

He finally said, “Chiaro, Salvatore. Grazie mille. Ciao,” which told her the conversation was ending.

Barbara felt only dread when he rang off, but the dread didn’t stop her. “What?” she asked. “What?”

“It appears to be E. coli,” he said.

Food contamination? she thought. Food? She said, “How the bloody hell did she die of food poisoning in this day and age? How does anyone die of food poisoning now?”

“Evidently, it was an enormously virulent strain, and the doctors didn’t recognise what it was because she reported being ill earlier due to her pregnancy. That’s what they initially thought they were still dealing with: a more serious version of morning sickness. Once they believed they had that sorted, they did other tests and those were all negative.”

“What sort of tests?”

“Cancers, colitis, other diseases. Colon and bowel. There was nothing, so they assumed she’d picked up a bug of some sort, as people do. They gave her a course of antibiotics as a precaution. And that’s what killed her.”

“Antibiotics killed her? But you said E. coli . . . ?”

“It was both. Evidently with E. coli—at least with this strain of it, as far as I can tell from what Salvatore said—antibiotics cause a toxin to be produced. Shiga, it’s called. It finishes off the kidneys. By the time the doctors realised from Angelina’s symptoms that her kidneys were going, it was too late to save her.”

“Bloody hell.” Barbara took this all in, and what seeped slowly into her consciousness was the fact that her body was relaxing for the first time in twelve hours and her mind was chanting, Thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God. Food poisoning ultimately leading to death, as unfortunate as it was, did not mean . . . what she did not want it to mean.

She said, “It’s over, then.”

Lynley gazed at her long before he said, “Unfortunately, it isn’t.”

“Why not?”

“No one else is ill.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it? They dodged the—”

“No one, Barbara. Anywhere. Not at Fattoria di Santa Zita—that’s the land Lorenzo Mura owns—not in any surrounding village, and not anywhere in Lucca. No one, as I said. Anywhere. Not in Tuscany. Nor in the rest of Italy. Which is one of the reasons the doctors didn’t recognise what they were dealing with immediately.”

“Should I be following this?”

“When E. coli’s involved, it’s generally referred to as a breakout. Do you see what I mean?”

“I see that this was an isolated case. But like I said, that’s good, isn’t it? That means . . .” And then she indeed saw what it meant, as clearly as she saw Lynley regarding her. Her mouth went dry. She said, “But they’d be checking everywhere for the source, right? They’d have to do that to prevent anyone else from getting infected. They’d be looking at everything Angelina ate and . . . Are there animals at this fattoria place?”

“Donkeys and cows, yes.”

“Could the E. coli have come from them? I mean, don’t animals pass this stuff on in some way? Aren’t we talking about . . . you know . . .”

“Evidently cattle are a reservoir for the bacteria, and it passes through their system. Yes. But I don’t believe there will be evidence of E. coli at Fattoria di Santa Zita, Barbara. Neither does Salvatore.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one else who ate there is ill. Hadiyyah, Lorenzo, even Azhar in the immediate days after Hadiyyah was found.”

“So maybe it’s . . . Does it incubate or something?”

“I’m vague on the details, but the point is someone there would have fallen ill by now.”

“Okay. Let’s say she went for a walk. Let’s say she got too near to a cow. Or let’s say she . . . P’rhaps she got it somewhere else. In town. At the marketplace. Visiting a friend. Picking something up off the road.” But even Barbara could hear the desperation in her voice, so she knew Lynley would clock it, as well.

“We go back to no one else being ill, Barbara. We go back to the strain itself.”

“What about the strain?”

“According to Salvatore”—with a nod at his mobile phone lying by his plate—“they’ve never seen anything like it. It’s to do with the virulence. A strain this virulent can take out an entire population before they identify its source. But that population falls ill quickly, in a matter of days. The health authorities become involved, and they begin looking at anyone else who might have seen a doctor or ended up in casualty with similar symptoms. But as I said, no one else has been ill. Not before Angelina. Not after Angelina.”

“I still don’t see how that’s such a bad thing. I don’t see why Azhar’s been detained unless . . .” Again that steady gaze upon her. She read the grim nature of it, but she read something else, and she wanted more than anything in her life not to be able to understand that look. She said lightly, “Oh, I see. They’re keeping Azhar in Lucca because they don’t want him to pass it on to someone else, I expect. If he’s got it in him—like dormant or something—and he brings it back to London . . . I mean, he could be a modern-day Typhoid Mary, eh?”

The look on Lynley’s face was unchanging. He said, “It doesn’t work that way. It’s not a virus. It’s a bacteria. It’s—if you will—a microbe. A quite dangerous microbe. You do see where this is leading, don’t you?”

She felt her face going numb. “No. I . . . I don’t, actually.” All the time, however, her brain was pounding inside her skull, a chant of Oh my God, Oh my God.

Lynley said, “If no source can be found at the fattoria itself or in the food supply that Angelina had access to both there and in Lucca and anywhere else she might have gone and if she remains the sole person infected, then where this all leads is to someone putting his hands on a virulent strain of the bacteria and putting it into Angelina’s system. Through her food is the most obvious means.”

“But why would someone . . . ?”

“Because someone wanted her dangerously ill. Someone wanted her dead. You and I both know that’s where all this is leading, Barbara. That’s why Azhar has been asked to turn in his passport.”

“You can’t possibly think that Azhar . . . How the bloody hell was he supposed to do it?”

“I think we also both know the answer to that.”

She pushed away from the table although she wasn’t sure where she was intending to go. She said, “He has to be told. He’s under suspicion. He has to be told.”

“I expect he knows already.”

“Then I’ve got to . . . We’ve got to . . .” She brought her knuckles to her mouth. She considered everything: from the moment Angelina Upman had taken her daughter from London the previous November to where they were now with Angelina dead. She refused to believe what was lying in front of her like a dead dog on the path she was hiking. She said, “No.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I have to—”

“Listen to me, Barbara. What you have to do now is to take yourself out of this at once. If you don’t do that, I can’t help you. Frankly, I don’t think I can help you as it is although I’m trying.”

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

Lynley leaned forward. “You can’t think Isabelle is unaware of what’s been going on, of what you’ve been up to, of whom you’ve seen, of where you’ve been. She knows it all, Barbara. And if you don’t begin walking the straight and narrow this very moment—here, now, and right in this room—the jeopardy you’ll be facing could cost you everything. Am I being clear? Do you understand?”

“Azhar didn’t kill her. He had no reason because they’d made peace and they were going to share Hadiyyah and . . .” It was Lynley’s face that cut off her words. Even beyond what she herself knew about Azhar and about what he’d done to bring about his daughter’s kidnapping and to position himself to be there in Italy when she was “found,” it was the compassionate sympathy in Lynley’s face that did her in. All she could say was “Really. He couldn’t.”

“If that’s the case,” Lynley replied, “Salvatore Lo Bianco will sort it all out.”

“And in the meantime . . . What the bloody hell do you suggest I do?”

“I’ve made the suggestion: get back to work.”

“That’s what you would do?”

“Yes,” he said steadily. “In your position, that’s what I would do.”

She knew he was lying when he said it, though. For the one thing Thomas Lynley would never do was desert a friend.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Salvatore Lo Bianco received the request for a meeting not from il Pubblico Ministero himself but from Piero Fanucci’s secretary. She rang his mobile and brusquely instructed him to go to the Orto Botanico, where he would find the magistrato waiting for him. “He wishes to have a private word with you, Ispettore,” was how she put it. “Now?” was how Salvatore responded. “Sì, adesso,” she replied. Signor Fanucci had arrived at work that morning in something of a state, and a few phone calls both made and received by him had heightened that state. It was her suggestion that Ispettore Lo Bianco leave at once for the botanical gardens.

Salvatore swore but he cooperated. The fact that phone calls had been made by Fanucci and received by him suggested he was on the trail of something. The fact that he had followed these phone calls with a demand for Salvatore’s presence suggested he was on the trail of what Salvatore himself was up to.

The botanical gardens were inside the wall of the old city, on its southeast edge. In the month of May, they were flourishing, and where flowers had been planted, they were gloriously abloom. Very few people were within the garden’s walls, however. At this hour, the Lucchese were themselves at work, while tourists generally stuck to visiting the churches and palazzi.

Salvatore found Fanucci admiring a mass of wisteria, which overhung an ancient stone trough that was filled with water lilies. He turned from the sight of branches dipping low with clusters of purple flowers as Salvatore approached him on the gravel path.

Piero was smoking a thick cigar, newly lit. He regarded Salvatore with an expression that managed to mix personal sorrow with professional anger. The anger, Salvatore thought, was real. The sorrow, he reckoned, was not.

“Talk to me, Topo” comprised Fanucci’s opening remarks. He flicked some ash from his cigar onto the path. He ground it into the sassolini with his foot. “You and the lovely Cinzia Ruocco have been meeting, no? You have an earnest talk with her in Piazza San Michele, and why do I suspect the two of you discuss matters from which you were told to step away? What has this to do with, Salvatore?”

Salvatore said, “Of what importance is Cinzia’s speaking with me? If I wish to meet a friend for a caffè—”

Fanucci held up a minatory finger. “Stai attento,” he snapped.

Salvatore did not appreciate the threat implied in being spoken to in such a way. He’d had quite enough of Fanucci. He felt his temper rise. He sought to control it. He said, “I see the unfortunate death of this woman Angelina Upman as suspicious. My job is to look at things when they seem suspicious. To me, there is a connection here.”

“Between what, may I ask?”

“I think you know.”

“Between the kidnapping of this woman’s child and her own death? Bah. Che sciocchezza!”

“If that is the case, then the only fool will be me. So what difference does it make that I speak to Cinzia about how this unfortunate woman died? I would think it pleases you anyway, to have her dead.”

Fanucci’s face reddened. His lips moved round the cigar and Salvatore could see his teeth clamp down. He, too, was trying to hold on to his temper. It was, he knew, only a matter of moments before one of them let loose.

“What is that supposed to mean, my friend?” Fanucci asked.

“It means that now this story of her death takes over the headlines. Poor Mamma of Kidnap Girl Dead in Her Sleep. And this turn of events directs the spotlight away from the kidnapping and away from Carlo Casparia at long last. It means that now you can release poor Carlo back into his life, which—as we both know, Piero—you were going to have to do quite soon anyway.”

Fanucci’s eyes narrowed. “I know nothing of the sort.”

“Please, do not think me a stupid man. You and I have been acquainted far too long for that. You know you have been wrong about Carlo. And since you cannot bear to be wrong, you have refused to release him. For then you would have to face scrutiny and commentary in the press, and this is something you cannot abide.”

“You dare to insult me this way, Salvatore?”

“The truth is not an insult. It is merely the truth. And to this truth, I would have to add with due respect that, in your position, an inability to face one’s errors is a very dangerous quality to possess.”

“As is jealousy,” Fanucci snapped. “Professional or personal, it robs a man not only of his dignity but also of his ability to do his job. In all of your thinking and respecting, Salvatore, have you ever once considered this?”

“Piero, Piero. Do you see how you try to alter our conversation? You wish to make it about me when it should be about you. You have wasted time and resources trying to mould what few facts you had into a case you could build against Carlo. Then when I would not accompany you down this ridiculous path you were determined to walk, you brought in Nicodemo, who would.”

“And this is how you see things?”

“Is there another way?”

“Certo. For your jealousy blinds you to the facts in front of you. It has done so from the moment this little English girl disappeared from the mercato. This has always been your weakness, Topo. This jealousy of yours infects all that you do.”

“You propose that I am jealous of what?”

“You are a man broken by his divorce, living back at home with his mamma, no other woman willing to abide you. And we must ask what it must do to your manhood to see someone else—someone like me, so ill formed, so repulsive to look upon—still with women eager to be bedded. Bedded by me, a veritable toad. And on top of that, to have this same toad order your replacement in an investigation because your work was not what it should have been . . . ? How does that feel? How do your colleagues look upon you? What do they think of you as they follow Nicodemo’s orders instead of yours, eh? Little Topo, have you wondered why you cannot step away from this case as you’ve been ordered? Have you asked yourself what you try to prove with all of these actions behind my back?”

Salvatore understood now why il Pubblico Ministero had wanted this meeting to occur away from his office. Fanucci had a larger plan in mind than merely goading and humiliating Salvatore, and Salvatore could only assume it had to do with saving face in the one way he could.

He said, “Ah. You are afraid, Piero. Despite what you say, you do see there may indeed be a connection between these events. The child is kidnapped. Then her mother dies. If there’s a connection between these two occurrences, it cannot possibly be a connection having to do with Carlo Casparia, Michelangelo Di Massimo, and Roberto Squali, can it? For Casparia’s in custody, Squali’s dead, and that leaves Michelangelo Di Massimo somehow putting his hands on a dangerous bacteria and also somehow getting Angelina Upman to ingest it without her knowledge. And how, possibly, could that have happened? So if there is a connection, it follows that someone else—”

“I have said it. There is no connection,” Fanucci said. “They are both unfortunate events but they are unrelated.”

“As you wish,” Salvatore said. “To believe otherwise . . . This would be a problem for you, sì? But at least the unfortunate Carlo is no longer a problem, Piero, for if you wish it, you can release the information of this death from E. coli to Prima Voce in your usual manner, as a leak. Then the paper will fan the flames of public panic to find the source of this deadly contamination. And while that is happening, you can ease Carlo out of the prison and by the time the papers have wind of it”—he snapped his fingers—“it has become old news. And hardly worthy of a story on the first page of the paper, eh? Death trumps kidnapping, after all, even if the corpse is not that of the kidnapped individual. You should be thanking me for making this possible, Piero, not quarrelling with me because I spoke to Cinzia Ruocco about how that poor woman actually died.”

“You are being ordered, here and now, Topo, to stand down from this matter. You are being told to hand over to Nicodemo Triglia every bit of information you possess on anything related to the kidnapping of the English girl and the death of her mother.”

“So you, too, believe they are related, despite your earlier words, eh? And what do you intend to do about that? Bury the evidence of murder so that you can pursue . . . Who is it you intend to pursue in the kidnapping now? It must be the hapless Di Massimo. He will be made guilty of the kidnapping while the death of the mother will merely be an unfortunate coincidence, a senseless tragedy following her daughter’s safe return. That is how it must be played so that you are not made to appear in the papers what you actually are. Blind, stubborn, lacking in all objectivity, and a fool.”

That did the job. Fanucci erupted. Il drago could no longer contain himself. He advanced on Salvatore and, when the blow came, it was with some surprise that Salvatore realised how strong the magistrato actually was. He delivered the uppercut with brutal accuracy. Salvatore’s head flew back, his teeth driven into his tongue, and then the second punch hit him. This was a blow to his guts, which readied him for the third punch. This one put him onto the ground. He half expected Fanucci to fall upon him then, so that they would roll in the gravel like two schoolboys. But as it turned out, that might have damaged il Pubblico Ministero’s bespoke suit. So instead, Piero delivered an agonising kick to Salvatore’s kidneys.

“You.” Piero grunted with each subsequent kick. “Speak. To. Me. In. This. Way.”

Salvatore could do nothing but protect his head as Piero Fanucci went for the rest of his body. He managed to say, “Basta, Piero!”

But it was not enough for Fanucci until Salvatore lay motionless on the ground. And by then Salvatore could only dimly hear the magistrate’s final words to him. “We shall see which of us is the greater fool, Topo.”

Which was, Salvatore decided as Fanucci walked off, Piero’s way of giving him permission to investigate the death of Angelina Upman to his heart’s content.

Bene, he thought. It very nearly made the beating worthwhile.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

He could barely get his key in the lock. Luckily his mamma heard the scraping of metal against metal. She came to the door, demanding to know who was there, and when she heard his weak voice, she threw the door open. He tumbled directly into her arms.

She screamed. Then she wept. Then she cursed the monster who had laid his brutal hands upon her only son. Then she wept some more. Finally, she helped him into a chair only three feet from the doorway. He was to sit, sit, sit, she told him. She was going to phone for un’ ambulanza. And then she was going to phone the police.

“I am the police,” he reminded her feebly. He added, “Non ho bisogno di un’ambulanza. Non la chiamare, Mamma.”

What? she demanded. He didn’t need an ambulance? He couldn’t walk, he could barely talk, his jaw looked broken, his eyes were blacked, his mouth was bleeding, his lips were cut, his nose could be broken, and inside his body God alone knew what damage had been done. She wept anew. “Who did this to you?” she demanded. “Where did this happen?”

He was too embarrassed to tell his mamma that il Pubblico Ministero—a man more than twenty years his senior—had beaten him so. He said, “Non è importante, Mamma. Ma puoi aiutarmi?”

She took a step back from him. What was he asking? she demanded, a hand at her breast. Did he think his own mamma might not help him? Would she not give her life for him? He was her blood. All of her children and their children were her reason for living in the first place.

So she bustled round and began to see to his injuries. She was accomplished at this, a woman who was mother to three and nonna to ten. She’d bound more wounds than she could remember. He was to put himself into her hands.

She did it well. She still wept as she worked, but she was tenderness itself. When she had finished her ministrations, she helped him carefully to a divano. He was to lie there, she told him, and he was to rest. She would call his two sisters. They would want to know what had happened. They would want to visit. And she herself would make his favourite farro soup. He would sleep while she worked upon this, and—

“No, grazie, Mamma,” Salvatore told her. He would rest a quarter of an hour and then he would return to work.

“Dio mio!” was her response to this idea. They went back and forth on the subject of his continuing his day as if nothing untoward had occurred. She would not hear of it, she would bar the door, she would cut off her hair and pour ashes on her head if he so much as put one toe outside of Torre Lo Bianco, chiaro?

He smiled weakly at her drama. Half an hour, he compromised. He would rest that long and that was all.

She threw her hands up. At least he would take a fortifying glass of wine, no? An ounce or two of limoncello?

He would take the limoncello, he told her. He knew that she was going to be relentless till he agreed with at least one of her suggestions.

At the half-hour mark, he eased himself off the divano. A wave of dizziness passed over him, followed by a surge of nausea, and he wondered if he’d been concussed. He made his way to a mirror near the entry to the tower and had a look at his reflection to assess the damage.

He thought wryly that at least the scars on his face from adolescent acne were now unremarkable since his features were at present so much more interesting than the remains of what those eruptions on his face had done to his skin. His eyes were swollen, his lips looked lumpy as if injected with a foreign substance, his nose was indeed possibly broken—its position seeming somewhat different from what he remembered—and already the bruising from Piero’s fists was starting to appear. He felt additionally bruised on every part of his body, as well. Cracked ribs were likely. Even his wrists hurt.

Salvatore had not known that Piero Fanucci was such a fighter. But on consideration, he had to admit that it made sense. Ugly beyond all possibility of self-reconciliation to this fact, possessing that unsettling adventitious finger upon his hand, springing from poverty and familial ignorance, exposed to the derision of others . . . Who could doubt that, given the alternative between life as a victim and life as an aggressor, Piero Fanucci had made the better choice? Reluctantly, Salvatore rather admired the man.

But he would have to do something about his own appearance lest he frighten women and children in the street. And there was the small matter of his clothing as well, which was filthy and, in some places, torn. So before he went anywhere, he was going to have to make himself presentable. This meant he was going to have to climb three flights of the tower steps to his bedroom.

He managed it, just. It took a quarter of an hour, and he did it mostly by dragging himself up via the handrail while below him his mamma clucked and chattered and called the Blessed Virgin to bring him to his senses before he killed himself. He staggered into his boyhood bedroom and did his best to remove his clothing without crying out in pain. It was the effort of another quarter hour that allowed him to succeed in fighting his way into a change of clothing.

In the bathroom he found the aspirina, and he downed four of them with big gulps of water from the tap. He washed his face, told himself he was feeling better already, and made his way back down the stairs. His mother waved both of her arms in a gesture declaring that, Pilate-like, she was not about to take responsibility for whatever lunacy he chose to commit himself to next. She decamped into the kitchen and started to bang round with her pots and pans. She would, he knew, make the farro soup. If she couldn’t stop him, at least she could nourish him on his return.

Before he left the torre, Salvatore placed the phone calls that would bring him up to the minute on the subject of the source of the E. coli that had resulted in Angelina Upman’s death. What he discovered was that the health authorities were playing a careful waiting game. Word had not gone out far and wide as to the cause of death because it had so far been an isolated incident. Steps had been taken at Fattoria di Santa Zita to locate a source of the bacteria there. All results of all tests were negative. So the health officials had moved on.

Every place Angelina had been in the weeks before her death was being considered, he was told. But still the curiosity of only a single person being affected by the bacteria had not yet been resolved. This was unheard of. It brought into question Cinzia Ruocco’s findings and the findings of the laboratory that had done the tests on the samples Cinzia had sent. Cross-contamination of some sort was now being considered. Cinzia’s own workplace was being evaluated. Nothing, frankly, about the death of the Englishwoman was making sense.

Salvatore noted all of this and from it he could draw only one conclusion. Her death from the bacteria made no sense to the health officials because they were looking at it the wrong way round. They were still seeing it as an accidental ingestion when it was nothing of the kind.

When it came to murder, the starting point was generally motive. In this case, though, it was also—and more important, perhaps—access to means. But Salvatore chose to look at motive first. It was a glaring one that could not be denied. It pointed directly at Taymullah Azhar.

When the question was, Who benefited from Angelina Upman’s untimely death?, the answer was the father of her child. When the question was, Who most probably would wish her dead?, the answer again was the father of her child. Her death gained him the return of Hadiyyah into his care permanently. Her death also garnered the vengeance he might have been seeking for having put him through the ordeal of losing her in the first place, not to mention the humiliation of his woman having had an affair while still living with him. No one else had a reason to murder her unless, possibly, there was someone in her life the police had yet to learn about. Another man, perhaps? A thwarted lover? A jealous friend? Salvatore supposed any of these were possible. But not likely, he thought. Sometimes the reason for the dog not barking at night was the most obvious reason of all.

Doing his homework on Taymullah Azhar was a simple enough thing. It required only access to the Internet, followed by a phone call to London. Taymullah Azhar was doing nothing to hide who he was, anyway. And the list of who he was was a point of significant interest: a professor of microbiology with a laboratory at University College London and an impressive list of academic papers to his name, the topics of which were indecipherable to Salvatore. But they were not as important as that one detail, microbiology. It was time to have a talk with the good professor, he decided. But to do that he would need the assistance of a discreet translator, his own English being far too limited to do justice to an interrogation.

He decided to have his conversation with Taymullah Azhar at the pensione where the man was staying. In advance of going there, he phoned the questura. He spoke to Ottavia Schwartz. Could the resourceful Ottavia arrange a translator to meet him inside the anfiteatro? he enquired. Not a police translator, mind you, but perhaps one of the many tour guides in the town . . . ?

“Sì, sì,” she told him. This would not be a problem, Ispettore. “Ma perché non un traduttore dalla questura?” she asked, and truthfully, it wasn’t an unreasonable question since they had a multilingual translator on staff who worked among all the police agencies in Lucca. But to involve that person would also involve word filtering over to Piero, and Salvatore had had enough of the magistrato for one day.

He told Ottavia it was more of the same that had gone before. Better for no one to know what he was up to until he had all his soldiers lined up for the attack.

This arrangement made, he went for his car and drove carefully to the anfiteatro. As with the narrow streets on which he travelled, one of the arched entries to the amphitheatre was wide enough for a small car, so he drove straight in and parked in front of the ample display of succulents arranged in tiers beneath Pensione Giardino’s windows. There he waited. He phoned London in the meantime and made a single request of Inspector Lynley. Lynley agreed to be of assistance in this matter. And yes, he said, he believed he could manage it without anyone at University College becoming wise to the matter.

Salvatore went across the piazza for a quick espresso, taken at the inside bar and mindful of the curious looks his appearance was garnering from the barista. He took his time about downing the caffè, and when he’d finished, he headed back to his car to see that the translator was waiting for him there.

He took a sharp breath that hurt his chest. He wondered if Ottavia’s selection of translator was deliberate or merely a chance assignment given by whatever independent organisation the young police officer had phoned. For leaning against the police car across the piazza and gazing round through enormous sunglasses for the policeman she was to meet was Salvatore’s own former wife.

He’d had no idea Birgit had taken up doing translating on the side, away from her work at the university in Pisa. It seemed out of character in her although, as a Swede, Birgit spoke six languages equally well. She would be in demand if she wished to make extra money as she no doubt did. On a policeman’s salary, Salvatore had little enough to give her in the way of child support.

She leaned against the side of his car, smoking a cigarette, as blond and shapely and attractive as ever. Salvatore girded himself to greet her. When he got to the car, she peered at him. She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “Non voglio che i tuoi figli ti vedano così,” she said abruptly. Typical of her. Not a question about what had happened to her poor former husband but rather a declaration about the children not seeing him in such a state. He couldn’t actually blame her, however. He didn’t want the children to see him looking like this either.

He told her he was surprised that she had taken up translating. She shrugged, a quintessential Italian movement that she’d learned from her years living in Tuscany. He had never seen it from another Swede. “Money,” she told him. “There’s never enough.”

He looked at her sharply to see if this was a dig. She wasn’t giving him one of her sardonic glances, though. He contented himself with understanding that she was merely stating a fact. He said, “You will explain to Bianca and Marco why their papà cannot see them for a day or two, Birgit?”

“I’m not heartless, Salvatore,” she told him. “You only think I am.”

This was not true. He only thought that they had been from the first badly matched, and this was what he told her.

She dropped her cigarette, crushing it with the toe of one of the stilettos that made her six inches taller than he. She said, “No one sustains lust. You thought otherwise. You were wrong.”

“No, no. At the end I still lusted—”

“I’m not speaking of you, Salvatore.” She nodded at the pensione. “Our English speaker is here?” she said.

He was still trying to wrest the sword from his throat. He nodded and followed her to the door.

Signora Vallera greeted them. Sì, Taymullah Azhar was still within the pensione, she told Salvatore, casting a curious glance at Birgit and taking in her great Swedish height, her tailored suit, her silk scarf, her sunlight hair, her silver earrings. The professor and his daughter had been making a plan to purchase flowers and ride bicycles to the cimitero comunale, but they had not yet left, she told them. They were in the breakfast room, studying the pianta stradale to plan a route. Should she fetch . . . ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I understand this now to be the case.”

“You did not know this previously?”

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

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

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

“And once you reached Italy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Azhar nodded. A conference of microbiologists, he said.

“Many of them?”

Perhaps three hundred, Azhar told him.

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

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

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

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

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

“I do not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Molto complesso,” Salvatore murmured.

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

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

“Streptococcus,” he said.

“And what do you do with this Streptococcus?”

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

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

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

“Questions?”

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

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

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

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

“This is correct.”

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

“This is also correct.”

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

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

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

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

“So they can indeed be transported?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“As a father should,” Salvatore said.

CHELSEA

LONDON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Doughty,” he said.

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

“But we knew that, Isabelle.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” he told her.

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

“I am not,” he said.

“So what am I to think . . . ?”

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

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

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

She held up her hand. “Don’t.”

“Then what?” he asked her.

“Can you not for one moment see where this is heading, for all of us? Can you not look beyond Barbara Havers for a bloody instant and realise the position she’s putting us in? Not only herself, but us as well.”

He had to see it because, like her, he was not a fool. But he also had to admit to himself that before this moment he hadn’t thought about the impact Barbara’s behaviour would have upon Isabelle herself should all of what she had done come out into the open. Hearing Isabelle’s voice tinged as it was with despair, he felt as if the clouds were parting and where the sun was shining was not, at this moment, upon Barbara. For Isabelle Ardery was in charge of all the officers, and the responsibility for what the members of her squad did and did not do ultimately rested upon her shoulders.

Cleaning house was what it was generally called in the aftermath of corruption’s coming to light. The rubbish got tossed to appease the public, and Isabelle Ardery stood in very good stead to be part of that rubbish.

He said to her, “This situation . . . It’s not going to come to that, Isabelle.”

“Oh, you know that, do you?”

“Look at me,” he said. And when she finally did so and when he read the fear in her eyes, he said, “I do. I won’t allow you to be damaged. I swear it.”

“You don’t have that power. No one does.”

Now as Lynley guided the Healey Elliott into Cheyne Walk, he tried to put his promise to Isabelle from his mind. There were bigger issues even than Barbara’s involvement with Taymullah Azhar, Dwayne Doughty, and Bryan Smythe, and those needed to be dealt with as soon as possible. Still, his heart was heavy as he parked the car near the top of Lawrence Street. He walked the distance back to Lordship Place and went in through the gate that led to a garden he knew as well as he knew his own.

They were in the last stages of an alfresco lunch beneath a cherry tree in magnificent bloom in the centre of the lawn: his oldest friend, that friend’s wife, and her father. They were watching an enormous grey cat slinking along an herbaceous border thick with lunaria, bellis, and campanula. They were apparently hot into a discussion on the subject of Alaska—said cat—and whether his best mousing days were over.

When they heard the squeak of the garden gate, they turned. Simon St. James said, “Ah, Tommy. Hullo.”

Deborah said, “You’re just in time to settle an argument. How are you on the subject of cats?”

“Nine lives or otherwise?”

“Otherwise.”

“Not an expert, I’m afraid.”

“Damn.”

Deborah’s father, Joseph Cotter, rose to his feet and said, “Afternoon, m’lord. A coffee?”

Lynley waved Cotter back to his seat. He fetched another chair from the terrace at the top of the steps that led to the house’s basement kitchen. He joined them at the table and took a look at the remains of their meal. Salad, a dish with green beans and almonds, lamb bones littering their plates, the tail end of a loaf of crusty bread, a bottle of red wine. Cotter had been cooking, obviously. Deborah’s talents were artistic, but her artistry was decidedly minimal in the kitchen. As for St. James . . . If he managed marmite on toast, it was cause for massive celebration.

“How old is Alaska?” he enquired, preparatory to giving his opinion.

“Lord, I don’t know,” Deborah said. “I think we got him . . . Was I ten years old, Simon?”

“He can’t possibly be seventeen,” Lynley said. “How many lives can he have?”

“I think he’s been through eight of them at least,” St. James told him. He said to his wife, “Perhaps fifteen.”

“Me or the cat?”

“The cat, my love.”

“Then I proclaim his mousing days . . . still ongoing,” Lynley said. He made a hasty benediction over the animal, who was at that moment attacking a fallen leaf with an enthusiasm that suggested he thought it was dinner.

“There you have it,” Deborah said to her husband. “Tommy knows best.”

“Having vast experience with felines?” St. James asked.

“Having vast experience of knowing with whom I ought to agree when paying a social call,” Lynley said. “I had a feeling that Deborah was on the side of mousing. She’s always been an advocate for your animals. Where’s the dog?”

“Being punished, if one can actually punish a dachshund,” Deborah told him. “She was being far too insistent about having her share of lamb, and she’s been put back into the kitchen.”

“Poor Peach.”

“You only say that because you weren’t present to witness her machinations,” St. James told him.

“We call it ‘love eyes,’” Deborah added. “She casts them upon one and it’s impossible to deny her.”

Lynley chuckled. He leaned back in his chair and took a final moment to enjoy their company, the day, the simple pleasure of gathering in the garden for lunch. Then he said, “It’s business I’ve come on, actually,” and as Joseph Cotter then rose as if to make himself scarce, Lynley told him to stay if he wished as there was no secret involved in his mission in Chelsea.

But Cotter said it was time for him to do the washing up. He took a tray from its resting place on the lawn and loaded it efficiently. Deborah helped him, and in a moment she and her father left the two men alone.

“What sort of business?” St. James asked him.

“Scientific, actually.” Lynley brought him into the picture regarding the death of Angelina Upman in Italy. He related the details from the phone call Salvatore Lo Bianco had made to him. St. James listened in his usual fashion, his angular face reflective.

At Lynley’s conclusion, he was silent for a moment before he said, “Could there have been a laboratory error? Having an isolated case of so virulent a strain of bacteria . . . To me, it doesn’t suggest murder as much as it suggests human error in examining what came from the dead woman’s gut. The point at which bacterial involvement is suspected . . . ? That should have happened while she was alive. It’s going to be difficult for Lo Bianco to prove anything, isn’t it? For example, how the E. coli entered her system at all.”

“I suppose that’s why he wants to begin with the lab. Will you do it for me?”

“Pay a call at University College? Of course.”

“Azhar claims his lab’s studying Streptococcus. Lo Bianco’s looking for anything else they might be studying. As for transport . . .” Lynley shifted in his chair. Movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Alaska had dived into the herbaceous border and a furious battle appeared to be going on among a patch of violas. He said, “Could he have transported a bacteria safely from London to Lucca, Simon?”

St. James nodded. “It merely needs to be put on a medium that allows it to survive, a broth and a solidifier. Onto the solid, one would streak the bacteria. Placed onto a petri dish, it not only would survive but grow.”

“How much would be needed to kill someone?”

“That depends, doesn’t it?” St. James said. “Toxicity is the key.”

“I have the impression from Salvatore that the E. coli we’re seeking is particularly toxic.”

“I’ll have to be careful, then,” Simon said. He folded his linen table napkin and pushed himself to his feet. He was disabled, so rising was always a rather awkward business for St. James, but Lynley knew better than to offer his assistance.

VICTORIA

LONDON

When Barbara saw who was ringing her mobile, she ducked into the stairwell to take the call. There were voices echoing up the stairs from somewhere far below, but they disappeared as whoever was climbing left the stairwell for one of the lower floors. She said to Azhar, “How are you? Where are you? What’s happening over there?” and although she tried to keep from her voice the desperate urgency that she was feeling, she could tell from his hesitation prior to responding that he heard it and wondered about it.

“I have a solicitor,” he told her. “He is called Aldo Greco. I wanted to give you his phone number, Barbara.”

She had a pencil but no paper, and she searched the floor frantically for something to write on before she had to give in and use the faded yellow wall. She took the number down for later programming into her mobile. She said, “Good. That’s an important step.”

“He speaks English very well,” Azhar said. “I’m told that it is lucky indeed that I found myself in need of a solicitor while being detained in this part of Italy. I’m told had this . . . this situation occurred in one of the small towns deeply south of Naples, it would be more difficult as a solicitor would have had to be willing to come from a larger city. I do not know why this is the case. It is merely what they told me.”

Barbara knew he was only making conversation. Her heart cracked a little at the thought that he would have to do this with her, his friend. She said, “What’s the embassy going to do? Have you spoken to anyone there?”

He said that he had, that it was the embassy who had given him a list of solicitors in Tuscany. But aside from that list, they could do little else for him beyond phoning his relatives, which he hardly wanted them to do. “They say that when a British national gets into difficulties on foreign soil, it’s up to that British national to get himself out of those difficulties.”

“Nice of them, informing you of that,” Barbara noted sardonically. “I always did wonder what our bloody taxes are going for.”

“Of course they have other concerns,” he said. “And as they do not know me and only have my word that there is no reason for the police to wish to question me . . . I suppose I can understand.”

Barbara found she could see him even without his presence. He’d be wearing one of the crisp white shirts he usually wore, she reckoned, along with trousers that were dark and simple. Cut well to fit him, the clothing would inadvertently reveal his slender frame. He’d always looked so delicate, she thought, so insubstantial when compared to other men. His appearance along with how well she knew him—and she knew him well, she told herself—spoke of his essential goodness. Which was, at the end of the day, why she gave him the information he needed in order to prepare himself for what was coming. This wasn’t about her loyalty to anyone, she told herself. This was about basic fairness.

She said, “Her kidney failure was caused by a toxin, Azhar. Shiga toxin it’s called.”

There was silence for a moment. Then he said, “What?” as if he hadn’t heard her clearly or, hearing her, couldn’t quite believe what she was telling him.

“DI Lynley rang the Italian bloke for me. He got the information.”

“From Chief Inspector Lo Bianco?”

“That’s the name. This bloke Lo Bianco said that Shiga toxin caused her kidneys to fail.”

“How is this possible? The strain of E. coli that results in Shiga toxin—”

“She picked it up somewhere, the E. coli. Apparently a bloody nasty strain of it. The doctors didn’t know what they were dealing with because of her earlier problems with the pregnancy, so they did a few basic tests and when the tests were negative or whatever they gave her a course of antibiotics—”

“Oh my God,” he murmured.

Barbara said nothing, and after a moment, he seemed to begin thinking aloud because he went on in a meditative tone with, “This is why he asked me about . . .” And then his voice altered to insistence as he said, “It has to be a mistake, Barbara. For one person alone to die from this? No. Virtually impossible. This is a bacteria, E. coli. It infects a food supply. Someone else would fall ill. Many people would fall ill because they would eat from the same food supply as Angelina. Do you see what I mean? This cannot have happened. There has to be a laboratory error.”

“As to laboratories, Azhar . . . You see where they’re heading, don’t you? The Italian coppers? With the whole idea of laboratories?”

He was silent then. The pieces were clicking into place. Or at least that was what Barbara had to believe. He wasn’t speculating in this silence, he wasn’t wondering, and he wasn’t planning his next move. He was merely concluding, completing for himself the chain of events that began with Angelina’s disappearance from London with their daughter in tow and ended with her death in Lucca.

He finally said quietly, “Streptococcus, Barbara.”

“What?”

“This is what we study in my laboratory at University College: Streptococcus. Some laboratories study more than one bacteria. We do not. We study more than one strain of it, of course. But only strains of Streptococcus. Of personal interest to me is the Strep that causes meningitis in newborn infants.”

“Azhar. You don’t have to tell me this.”

“The mother, you see,” he said insistently as if she hadn’t spoken, “passes it to the infant as the baby travels through the birth canal. From this develops—”

“I believe you, Azhar.”

“—the infant’s meningitis. We’re seeking a way to prevent this.”

“I understand.”

“And there are other forms as well, other forms of Strep that we study in the lab since the graduate students are working on dissertations and the postgraduates are working on papers to be published. But the one I study . . . It is as I said. And of course Angelina was pregnant so they will ask about this, won’t they? How coincidental is it that I would study a bacteria found in pregnant women? And they will wonder as you are wondering because, after all, I arranged the kidnapping of my own child—”

“Azhar, Azhar.”

“I did not harm Angelina,” he said. “You cannot think I harmed her.”

She hadn’t been thinking that. She couldn’t even bring herself close to thinking that. But the truth was that in this entire Italian situation, there was more than one kind of harm, and Azhar knew this as well as Barbara herself. She said, “The kidnapping. Those tickets to Pakistan. You have to see how it’s going to look in conjunction with her death if word gets out.”

“Only you and I know about these things, Barbara.” His voice was wary.

“What about Doughty and Smythe?”

“They work for us,” he said. “We do not work for them. They’ve been instructed . . . You must believe me because if you of all people do not believe . . . I did not harm her. Yes, the kidnapping was a terrible thing to arrange, but how else could she ever be made to experience what it feels like when your child is there one day and gone the next and you have no idea . . . ?”

“Pakistan, Azhar. One-way tickets. Lynley knows about them. And he’s doing his homework.”

“You are not thinking,” he cried. “Why would I purchase tickets for July but arrange Angelina’s death in May? Why would I do that when I would have no need of tickets to Pakistan with Angelina dead?”

Because, Barbara thought, those tickets absolve you of suspicion and I did not see that until this moment because I couldn’t see it until I learned how Angelina Upman died. She said none of this, but her silence seemed to tell Azhar that something more was required of him, if not now then the next time Inspector Lo Bianco wanted to question him.

He said, “If you think I harmed her, you must ask yourself where I got this bacteria. Of course, someone somewhere in England studies it and perhaps in London but I do not know who. And yes, of course, this is an easy enough thing for me to find out. So I could have found out. But so could anyone else.”

“I see that, Azhar. But you have to ask how likely it is . . .” And here she paused because she had to consider what she owed: not only to Lynley, to Azhar, to Hadiyyah, but also to herself. She said, “The thing is . . . you lied to me once and—”

“I do not lie now! And when I did lie . . . How could I tell you what I had planned? Would you have allowed me to go forward and kidnap her? No, you would not. An officer of the police? How could I have expected this of you? It was something that had to be done on my own.”

As murder is generally done, she thought.

A silence endured between them, broken finally by Azhar. “Is there nothing you are willing to do to help me now?” he asked.

“I haven’t said that.”

“But it’s what you think, isn’t it? ‘I must distance myself from this man because if I do not, it could cost me everything.’”

Which was, Barbara thought wryly, not that far off from what DI Lynley had told her. Everything was on the line for her unless she could think of a way to get herself one step ahead of the Italian police.

THE WEST END

LONDON

Mitchell Corsico was the way, she decided. Once she programmed the phone number of Azhar’s solicitor into her mobile and rubbed it off the stairwell’s wall, she rang the reporter and said, “We need to meet. Angelina Upman’s dead. Why’d you blokes not pick up on the story?”

His fire wasn’t lit. “Who says we didn’t pick up on the story?”

“I sure as hell didn’t see it.”

“Are you saying I’m responsible for what you see or don’t see in the paper?”

“Are you saying it was in the paper but it didn’t make front-page news? You are seriously out of the loop, son. We better meet, pronto.”

He still didn’t bite, the wily bastard. “Tell me why this is front-page news, and I’ll tell you if we need to meet, Barb.”

She refused to be irritated by the bloke’s arrogance. She said, “Did it even make The Source, Mitchell? A British girl is kidnapped from a crowd of people, then she’s found stowed in a convent in the Italian Alps under the care of a mental case who thinks she’s a nun, then her mother dies unexpectedly. What part of this isn’t the kind of story that’s meat and potatoes to you lot?”

“Hey, she made page twelve. If she’d done us a favour and offed herself, she’d’ve made page one, but what can I tell you? She didn’t, so she got buried inside.” He guffawed and added, “Pardon the pun.”

“And what if she actually did you blokes a real page-one favour and died in a way that the powers in Italy want hushed up?”

“What, are you saying the Prime Minister killed her? What about the Pope?” Another irritating guffaw from the bloke. “She died in hospital, Barb. We got all the facts. She slipped into a coma and she never came out of it. Her kidneys were done for. So what’re you suggesting: that someone tiptoed into her hospital room and put kidney poison in her drip bag?”

“I’m suggesting you and I need to talk and I’m not prepared to talk till I see your face.”

She allowed him to dwell on this while she herself feverishly considered which of the many ways possible would be best to spin the story in order to hook The Source. Politically the rag had become so nationalist over the years, it was practically Nazi in its leaning. She decided flag waving was the way to go. Brits versus the Pasta Eaters. But not yet. Not till she had him hooked.

He finally said, “All right. But this had better be very good, Barb.”

She said, “It is,” and just to be pleasant, she allowed him to name the place of their meeting.

He chose Leicester Square, the half-price ticket booth. The real half-price ticket booth, he told her, not some wannabe. There was a fancy notice board next to the real one where tickets on offer for the dramas, comedies, and musicals were announced. He’d meet her there.

She kept her voice airy. “I’ll wear a rose in my lapel.”

“Oh, I expect I’ll know you by the sweat of your desperation,” he said.

They set up a time, and she got there early. Leicester Square was, as usual, a terrorist’s wet dream, with the crowds only getting worse as summer came on. Now there were masses of tourists gathered at open-air restaurants, in front of buskers, buying tickets for the cinema, and attempting to negotiate terms for theatrical productions in need of an audience. By mid-July the masses would have morphed into hordes, and moving through them would be nigh impossible.

She planted herself in front of the notice board and made a show of studying its offerings. Musicals, musicals, musicals, musicals. Plus Hollywood celebrities trying to be stage actors. Shakespeare was spinning in his grave, she reckoned.

She was seven and a half minutes into listening to various debates all round her—what to see, how much to spend, whether Les Miz could possibly run for yet another century or maybe two—when the scent of aftershave worked on her like smelling salts. Mitchell Corsico was at her side.

She said, “What the bloody hell are you wearing? Essence of horse? Christ, Mitchell.” She waved a hand in front of her face. “Isn’t the get-up enough for you?” How long, she wondered, could one man possibly keep wearing clothes that suggested a bloke on a quest to find Tonto?

He said, “You wanted this meeting, right? So it needs to be important or I’m not a happy horseman.”

“How does an Italian cover-up sound?”

He glanced round. The jostling of people trying to see the notice board was something of a trial, so he moved towards the edge of the square in the direction of Gerrard Street and its one-hundred-yard claim of being London’s Chinatown. Barbara followed. He planted himself squarely in front of her, then, and said, “What’re you talking about? You better not be playing me.”

“The Italians have the cause of death. They’re not saying officially what it is. They don’t want the papers getting a whiff of it because they don’t want to start a panic. Either among the people or in the economy. Is that enough for you?”

His gaze shifted from her to a balloon seller to her again. “Could be,” he said. “What’s the cause?”

“A strain of E. coli. A super strain. A deadly strain. The worst there is.”

His eyes narrowed. “How d’you know this?”

“I know it because I know it, Mitchell. I was there when the call came through from the rozzers.”

“‘Came through’? Where?”

“DI Lynley. He got the word from the chief investigator in Lucca.”

Mitchell’s eyebrows locked. He was, she knew, evaluating her words. He wasn’t a fool. Content was one thing. Meaning was another. The fact that she would bring Lynley into anything at all was raising his warning hairs.

He said, “Why would you be telling me? That’s what I’m wondering.”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Not to me.”

“Bloody hell, Mitchell. You know E. coli comes from food, don’t you? Contaminated food.”

“So she ate something bad.”

“We’re not talking about a single vinegar crisp, mate. We’re talking about a supply of food. Who knows what? Spinach, broccoli, minced beef, tinned tomatoes, lettuce. For all I know it got baked into her lasagna. But the point is, if the word gets out, that whole industry in Italy takes a hit to the solar plexus. A whole section of their economy—”

“You can’t be suggesting there’s a lasagna industry.”

“You know what I mean.”

“So maybe she had a burger somewhere and a worker went to the loo and didn’t wash his hands before stacking on the tomatoes?” He shifted his weight from one cowboy-booted foot to the other and pushed his Stetson farther back on his head. He was garnering one or two curious glances from people who looked to be seeking whatever violin case or other receptacle in which they were supposed to deposit appreciative ten-pence pieces for his costuming, but there weren’t many of those since, in Leicester Square, far more interesting sights existed than the one presented by a London man in a cowboy get-up. “And anyway, the fact that only one person died . . . That pretty much supports the idea, doesn’t it? One person, one burger, one bad tomato.”

“With this bloke, whoever he was, and assuming they even serve burgers in Lucca, Italy—”

“Christ. You know what I mean. The burger’s an example. Say it was a salad. What about that salad with tomatoes and that Italian cheese and whatever that green crap is they put on it? That leafy bit.”

“I look like I would know that, Mitchell? Come on, I’m giving you a significant heads-up on a story that’s going to break in Italy at any moment, only you now have the edge because, believe me, the cops and the health blokes over there aren’t about to release it and cause a stampede away from Italian products.”

“So you say.” But he wasn’t a fool. “Why’re you into this anyway, Barb? This got to do with . . . ? Where’s our Love Rat Dad these days?”

There was no way she wanted him anywhere near Azhar. She said, “Haven’t spoken to him. He went to Lucca for the funeral. I expect he’s back now. Or still there with the kid, getting her packed. Who the bloody hell knows? Listen, you can do what you want with this story, mate. I think it’s gold. You think it’s lead? Fine, don’t run it. There’re other papers who’d be happy to—”

“I didn’t say that, did I? I just don’t want this to be another bomb like the other.”

“What d’you mean, ‘bomb’?”

“Well, let’s face it, Barb, the kid was found.”

Barbara stared at the man. She wanted so badly to punch his Adam’s apple that her fingernails clawed at the skin of her palms. She said slowly as her blood pounded so hard in her head that she thought she would soon see stars, “Too right, Mitch. That was a blow for your lot. So much better to have had a corpse. Mutilated, too. That would move those copies right off the newsstand.”

“I’m only saying . . . Look, this is an ugly business. You know that. Fact is, you and I wouldn’t be talking in the first place if you thought it was anything else.”

“If we’re talking ugly, Italian cops and Italian politicos in bed with each other is bloody ugly. That’s your story, at the cost of an Englishwoman’s life with more lives in jeopardy. You can take it or leave it to another rag. Decision is yours.”

She turned and began to stride towards Charing Cross Road. She would walk the distance back to New Scotland Yard. She needed the time to cool off, she reckoned.

WAPPING

LONDON

Dwayne Doughty had lots of ideas on the subject of how Emily Cass afforded her flat in Wapping High Street but he decided not to pursue them. He could tell, however, that Bryan Smythe was mentally listing the potential sources of income allowing her to occupy a second-floor conversion in a Grade II–listed warehouse overlooking the Thames. She couldn’t possibly own it, Smythe was thinking. Therefore she had it on let. But the cost would be enormous. She couldn’t pay it on her own. There was a man involved then, depend upon it. She was—gasp!—a kept woman. Or someone’s live-in lover, more likely. In exchange for sexual favours accomplished in the astounding athletic positions of which a woman in her physical condition was capable, she domiciled herself within brick walls, exposed beams and pipes, and mod cons of stainless steel. It was a subject worthy of some considerable teeth gnashing. Doughty reckoned Smythe’s poor molars would be worn to the nubs by the end of their confab.

They were meeting in Wapping at Emily’s suggestion. With what they were up to, she had insisted, they could no longer risk any location where the cops had shown their faces and might do so again or any other location in a public place. That left her flat. Hence their presence in a conversation grouping of low-slung leather furniture surrounding an even lower glass-topped coffee table, all of it overlooking the river. She’d placed a stainless steel coffee service on this, along with cups and a plate of bakery items supplied by Bryan. He—Dwayne—was enjoying an apricot-filled croissant and meditating on how to score an apple tart next, knowing that Emily wasn’t about to touch any of it.

Dwayne was also aware of the fact that Emily’s insistence upon meeting elsewhere had to do with the disintegrating nature of the little trinity of malefactors that they comprised. She wouldn’t trust him not to document their every word in some fashion in his office, and she wouldn’t trust Bryan Smythe not to do the same in his palace in South Hackney. Here in Wapping she had some semblance of control. Dwayne had decided to give her that.

Their purpose in meeting was to make certain they were all on the same page, in the same loop, and dancing the same dance when it came to what they had begun referring to as the Italian Job. Much of what was being done was being done by Bryan, so he had the floor. Despite being miles away from anyone who would have been remotely interested in what they had to say to one another, the three of them hunched round the coffee table, speaking in murmurs and looking at what documents Bryan had generated in order to spot any weaknesses in them.

What Bryan Smythe had created, with the participation of hackers and insiders whom he knew by the dozens, was the necessary trail, which illustrated the veracity in the claims Doughty had made and was continuing to make about one Michelangelo Di Massimo. Thus, for their delectation, he was presenting to them the invoices that showed all the payments that had been made to Di Massimo for his ostensibly brief search for Angelina Upman and her daughter in Pisa, Italy. Additionally, however, they were examining the documents that would allegedly prove that—having reported his failure to find the missing people while all the time knowing where they were—Di Massimo had begun moving sums of money from his own account to Roberto Squali’s account in supposed payment for Squali’s planning and kidnapping of the child. Thus actual bank transactions from London to Pisa proved that Doughty had been paying small amounts for Di Massimo’s expenses—petrol, mileage, meals, et cetera—and for his hourly billing, while Smythe-created bank transactions from Pisa to Lucca looked as if Di Massimo had been paying large amounts to Squali for something questionable about which, alas and despite anything Di Massimo might be saying, Doughty knew nothing at all. Bryan had gone so far as to create the receipts as well.

The reliability of this information, of course, depended upon the Italian coppers not delving into too many layers of the British banking system or any British system, for that matter. For of course there were backups, counter-backups, and massive storage systems in hundreds of locations. But Doughty et al. were depending upon the general incompetence and known corruptibility of all Mediterranean countries when it came to complicated legal, political, and technological issues. This, they reckoned, would allow the team of Cass-Smythe-Doughty to carry the day.

The Di Massimo Problem of the Italian Job massaged into a form that the Italian police were likely to swallow, what remained was the DS Barbara Havers Problem. The infuriating woman still had in her possession the backups that could sink all of them, and because of this, she had to be dealt with. This was more difficult but not impossible: Sums matching what Di Massimo had transferred to Squali were shown to have been earlier wired from the account of one Barbara Havers to the account of Michelangelo Di Massimo. And sums matching this amount were shown to have been wired from the account of Taymullah Azhar to the account of Barbara Havers in advance of that movement. Thus, Barbara Havers would soon discover that she was now complicit in the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Upman.

Wasn’t techno-wizardry incredible, mate?