Just One Evil Act

13 May

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Bah! was Salvatore’s reaction when the packet of information from London arrived on his desk. It was—merda!—entirely in English. But Salvatore recognised the name repeated on nearly every sheet: Michelangelo Di Massimo.

Salvatore knew he was meant to turn this material over to Nicodemo Triglia. Nicodemo was, after all, in charge of all matters relating to the kidnapping enquiry. As it was, though, he decided to hold on to it until he better understood its contents. For this, he needed an English speaker who had nothing to gain from reporting Salvatore Lo Bianco’s activities to il Pubblico Ministero for personal gain. That left out everyone associated with the police. Remaining, once again, was Birgit.

His ex-wife would not allow him at her house, she told him briskly when he phoned. He couldn’t blame her. Just as she had no wish for Bianca and Marco to see his beaten face, so also did he not wish it. They agreed to meet across the street from Scuola Dante Alighieri. There, a children’s park contained benches for their parents as well as swings, slides, roundabouts, and such, and Birgit would wait for him on one of those benches. He was to make certain that their children were fully enclosed in the embrace of the scuola before he arrived, chiaro?

Chiaro, he assured her.

He found her on the bench farthest from the school, shaded by a large sycamore tree. Nearby, two women with toddlers in pushchairs sat on opposite ends of a bench in the pleasant sunlight, smoking and speaking on their mobile phones. Their children dozed in the warm morning air.

Salvatore walked to join his ex-wife. He eased himself onto the bench. He’d wrapped his chest tightly with elastic bandages, and while they did something for the pain in his ribs, they constricted his movement and made his breathing shallow.

“How is it?” she asked. “You look even worse.” She shook a cigarette from a pack and offered him one. He thought the taste would be nice and the nicotine nicer. But he didn’t believe his lungs could handle the experience.

“It’s the bruising,” he replied. “It has to go purple first, then yellow. I’m fine.”

She tutted. “You should have reported him, Salvatore.”

“To whom? To himself?”

She lit her cigarette. “Then you should beat him senseless when you have the chance. What’s Marco to think if his own father won’t defend himself when he is set upon?”

There was no good answer to this question, and after their years of marriage, Salvatore liked to think he was wise enough not to engage Birgit in these sorts of vague philosophical debates. So from a manila envelope he took the report and he handed it to her. He understood the bank statements, the receipts, and the telephone records, of course, he informed Birgit. It was the larger reports he needed her help in translating.

“You need to work on your English,” she told him with a scowl. “How you’ve got this far without more than one language . . . And don’t tell me that at least you have French, Salvatore. I remember rescuing you from trying to speak to the waiters in Nice.” She began to read.

For some minutes she did this in silence. He watched one of the toddlers struggling to get out of his pushchair as the poor child’s mother continued her chat on her mobile phone. The other woman had ended her conversation, but she’d promptly begun texting and her child went ignored. Salvatore sighed and silently cursed modern life.

Birgit flicked ash from her cigarette, flipped the page, continued reading, made a few hmphs, gave a few nods, and looked up at him. “This is all from a man called Dwayne Doughty,” she said, inclining her head at the document, “sent to you as directed by an officer of New Scotland Yard. This Doughty gives you an account of hiring Michelangelo Di Massimo to assist in the finding of a London woman who disappeared with her daughter. He tracked them himself to Pisa airport by means of their ticket purchases and through information provided by the border agents in England. He asked Michelangelo Di Massimo to take it from there and Michelangelo made the attempt. He describes the various methods this Michelangelo used and, as proof of this, he sends you also copies of his bills for services and costs incurred. He says that having checked with trains, with taxis, with private car companies, and with the buses—both touring buses and city buses—Signor Di Massimo claimed to have found no trace of the woman beyond the airport. All of the car hire agencies, too, showed no trace of her having picked up a hire car, either at the airport or in Pisa. What’s known is that she landed at Galileo with her daughter and then disappeared. According to Signor Doughty, his conclusion—Michelangelo Di Massimo’s—was that the woman and girl had been fetched by a private party and taken somewhere. This is what he told the London detective in his reports and the London detective tells you that he relayed this information to the child’s father, along with Signor Di Massimo’s name and details. He says it is his belief that all arrangements from that point were made between these two men privately as he had nothing more to do with the matter.”

Salvatore speculated upon the information. That it contradicted what Di Massimo was telling the police came as no surprise to him. In a situation like this, it was understandable that the individuals under suspicion would soon enough begin pointing fingers at each other.

Birgit said, “He also includes records that he has managed to come by, showing amounts of money leaving the bank account of”—she fingered through the papers to find what she was looking for—“Taymullah Azhar and he speculates that they might have entered the account of Signor Di Massimo once his own business with Signor Azhar was concluded. He encourages you to seek this information about Signor Di Massimo’s bank yourself. He points out that while he has no way of knowing what this exchange of money was for, it bears looking into since it suggests that long after his own business with Signor Di Massimo was concluded, Signor Azhar hired him on his own to do something. It was probably to kidnap his daughter, eh?, although he doesn’t say that directly in the report. He says that his own business with Di Massimo ended last December within a few weeks of hiring, and he assures you that all the documents he’s attaching will support that fact. As will, he says, Di Massimo’s bank records if you are able to obtain them.” She handed the report and its appended documents to Salvatore, who returned them to the envelope. She said, “Interesting that he mentions them twice, those banking records of Di Massimo, no? Have you looked at his bank records, Salvatore? You can do that, can’t you?”

He crossed his arms and leaned back against the bench, stretching his legs with a wince. He said, “Certo. And Di Massimo was paid by this man as he says. But he tells a different story altogether, as you would expect.”

“But if the bank records that this London man sends and the telephone records and all his invoices and receipts—”

“Untrustworthy as a puttana’s claim of love, cara. There are too many ways to manipulate information, and the London man believes I do not know this. I suspect that this man would like to engage me in chasing down all of his nonsense”—Salvatore nodded at the report between them—“because that will keep me busy and away from the truth and because, to him, I’m an Italian fool who drinks too much wine and does not know when someone is leading me by my nose like an ass.”

“You’re talking nonsense. What do you mean?”

“I mean that Signor Doughty wishes the door to shut upon this investigation, with Michelangelo behind it and no one else. Or, perhaps, with Michelangelo and the professor behind it. But in either case, with himself uninvolved.”

“That may well be the truth, no?”

“It may be.”

“And even if it is not, even if this London man Doughty directed Signor Di Massimo in the matter of the kidnapping . . . What can you do to him from Lucca? How do you extradite on such speculation? And how do you prove anything anyway?”

“He assumes in this”—Salvatore indicated the report—“that I have not earlier looked into Michelangelo Di Massimo’s banking records, Birgit. He assumes I have no copy of them. He assumes I would not compare them to what he sends me now. And he does not know that I have this.” He took from his jacket pocket the copy of the card he’d received from Captain Mirenda. He handed it to her.

She read it, frowned, and handed it back. “What is this khushi?”

“The name he calls her.”

“Who?”

“The child’s father.” And he explained the rest: how it went from Squali to the child and how she had kept it beneath a mattress at Villa Rivelli. Squali, he told her, may have dreamed up the card, but he had certainly not dreamed up khushi. Whoever had written it knew the child’s pet name. And that was a narrow field of people indeed.

“Is this his handwriting?” Birgit asked.

“Squali’s?”

“Her papà’s.”

“I have little enough to compare to it—just the documents and written remarks at his pensione and I am no expert in the matter of handwriting, of course—but it looks the same to me and when I show it to the professor, I expect his face will tell me the truth. Very few people lie well. I think he will be among those who cannot. Beyond that, it is clear that his daughter believed he wrote it.” Salvatore explained how the card had been used.

Birgit, however, made a very good point, saying, “Would she know her papà’s handwriting, though? Think of Bianca. Would she know yours? What have you ever written to her other than ‘Love from Papà’ on a birthday card?”

He inclined his head to indicate that she had a good point.

“And if it is her papà’s writing, does this not show that the London detective is telling the truth? Her papà writes the card and hands it over—or posts it—to Michelangelo Di Massimo, who takes it from there, hiring Squali to take the child from the mercato because he himself does not wish to be implicated in a public abduction.”

“All of this is true,” he said. “But at the moment, you see, it is no longer the abduction of the child that interests me.” He shifted his position on the bench so that he could gaze upon his ex-wife. Despite their differences and the regrettable alacrity with which her lust for him had faded away, Birgit had a good mind and clear vision. So he asked her the question he’d come to ask. “The investigation into the kidnapping is, of course, no longer mine to direct. By rights, I should pass along this copy of the card to Nicodemo Triglia, vero? And yet if I do, all matters pertaining to Taymullah Azhar will be taken from me. You see this, no?”

“What ‘matters’ will be taken from you?” she asked shrewdly.

He told her of the means of Angelina Upman’s death. He said, “Murder is a larger question than kidnapping. Keeping Nicodemo and—let us face the truth squarely—Piero Fanucci occupied with Michelangelo Di Massimo as their culprit allows me access to the child’s father that I would not have if Nicodemo and Piero knew about this card.”

“Ah. That alters the situation. I see.” She wiped her hands together as if dismissing every qualm he had about the nature of what he was obliquely suggesting. She said, “I say keep the copy of the card and let Piero Fanucci sink in his own stew.”

“But to let Michelangelo Di Massimo take all the blame for the kidnapping of the child . . . ,” he murmured.

“You do not know when this card reached Italy in the first place. You do not even know who sent it. It could be years old and written for another matter entirely—the little girl’s keepsake of her father, per esempio—or it could be something someone came across and saw how it could be used . . . Anything is possible, caro,” she said. And then she quickly altered the endearment to “Salvatore” as colour flooded her cheeks. “And anyway isn’t it time that Piero was taught his lesson? I suggest you allow him to trumpet to the newspapers as much as he would like: ‘Di Massimo’s our man! We have the evidence! Put the stronzo on trial!’ And then, of course, a copy of this card sent on the sly to Di Massimo’s attorney . . . ? You owe Piero nothing. And, as you say, murder is a larger issue than abduction.” She smiled at him. “I tell you: Do your worst, Salvatore. Solve this murder and the abduction and send Fanucci directly to hell.”

He smiled in turn and winced just a bit at the pain. “You see? This is why I fell in love with you,” he told her.

“Had it only lasted” was her reply.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Back in his office, at the centre of his desk, Salvatore found a stack of photographs along with a note from the resourceful Ottavia Schwartz. She had managed to have them printed on the sly, and they featured everyone who had attended the funeral and the burial of Angelina Upman.

“Bruno was there, Salvatore.”

He looked up. She’d seen him and slipped into his office, closing the door behind her. She blanched at the sight of his face. She said shrewdly, “Il drago?” and made a colourful suggestion as to what il Pubblico Ministero could do to himself. Then she joined Salvatore at the desk and pointed out Daniele Bruno, with his bulbous ears, standing among a group of men consoling Lorenzo Mura. Ottavia unearthed another picture of him, head bent to Lorenzo as they spoke by the gravesite. But the import of this? Salvatore asked her. How could it mean anything more than all of the other mourners who spoke to Lorenzo Mura that day? Like Mura, Bruno was on the city’s squadra di calcio. Was Ottavia suggesting that he alone of the team members had gone to the funeral of Lorenzo Mura’s beloved?

That had not been the case, of course. The other team members had been there. So had the parents of the children whom Lorenzo Mura coached in private sessions. So had other individuals from the community. So had the Mura and the Upman families.

It was this last group upon whom Salvatore focused. He brought a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and he gazed upon the face of Angelina Upman’s sister. He’d never seen twins who bore such a remarkable likeness to each other. There was usually something—some tiny detail—that differentiated them, but in the case of Bathsheba Ward, he could not tell what it was. She might have been Angelina Upman sprung to life once more. It was quite astounding, he thought.

VICTORIA

LONDON

The fact that the wife of one Daniele Bruno was a flight attendant on the regular route between Pisa and London turned out to be a nonstarter, as Lynley had thought it might when he checked into it for Salvatore Lo Bianco. She flew into and out of Gatwick several times a day, but that was an end to it. She never had cause to spend the night. She would do, on the off chance that an extreme flight delay resulted in aircraft being held overnight. But when that occurred—which it had not done in the past twelve months—she stayed with the rest of the flight crew at an airport hotel and left the next morning.

Lynley reported all this to Salvatore, who agreed that the matter of Daniele Bruno was turning into an unmistakable dead end. He’d seen all the photos of the funeral, he said. Bruno was there, certo, but so was everyone else. “I think he has nothing to do with nothing,” Salvatore said in English.

Lynley didn’t point out that the double negative resulted in Daniele Bruno being guilty of something, if only of being part of a fantasy from the fractured mind of a drug addict. For they had only the word of Carlo Casparia that Bruno had met Lorenzo Mura alone at the football practice field in the first place. And this word had come after being held without a solicitor’s involvement, after days of interrupted sleep and very little food. Daniele Bruno was a nonstarter, he reckoned, just like his wife.

But there had to be someone, somewhere, with access to something . . .

They both knew who that someone probably was.

St. James’s arrival at New Scotland Yard added little to the mix they had. Lynley met his friend in Reception, and they spoke to each other over morning coffee on the fourth floor.

It had been easy enough for St. James to visit Azhar’s lab. By virtue of his university background and his reputation as a forensic scientist and expert witness, he had colleagues everywhere. A few phone calls had made a walkthrough of the lab a simple thing to arrange. The excuse was meeting the distinguished professor of microbiology Taymullah Azhar. Since he wasn’t there, the offer made by one of Azhar’s two research technicians to show St. James round the lab was accepted with gratitude. They were fellow scientists after all, were they not?

The lab was extensive and impressive, St. James told Lynley, but for all intents and purposes the subject of study was indeed various strains of Streptococcus. The focus had to do with mutations of these strains, and the equipment in the lab supported this work.

“From what I could see, it appears to be a fairly straightforward operation,” St. James said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what’s there is what one would expect in a lab of its type: fume cupboards, centrifuge, autoclave, refrigerators for storing DNA, sequencers for the DNA data, freezers for bacterial isolates, incubators for bacterial cultures, computers . . . There appear to be two main areas of study going on: the Streptococcus that causes necrotising fasciitis—”

“Which is?”

St. James added a packet of sugar to his coffee and stirred it. “Flesh-eating bacteria syndrome,” he said.

“Good God.”

“The other is the Streptococcus that causes pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis. They’re both serious strains, obviously, but the second one—it’s called Streptococcus agalactiae—crosses the blood-brain barrier and can be deadly.”

Lynley thought about this. He said, “Is there a chance someone in the lab could be studying E. coli on the sly?”

“I suppose anything’s possible, Tommy, but to know for certain you’d need a mole inside the place. Some of the equipment could be used for E. coli cultures, obviously. But the broths for growing each of them would be different, as would the incubators. Strep requires a carbon dioxide incubator. E. coli doesn’t.”

“Could there be more than one kind in the lab?”

“More than one kind of incubator? Certainly. At least a dozen people work in the place. One of them may have something brewing that deals with E. coli.”

“Without Azhar’s knowledge?”

“I doubt it would be without his knowledge unless someone has a nefarious reason for studying it.”

They exchanged a long look. St. James finally said, “Ah. It’s a tricky thing, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed.”

“He’s a friend of Barbara’s, isn’t he? Certainly, she could have some insight here, Tommy. Perhaps if she were to go to the lab herself and do a bit of delving on a pretext having to do with Azhar . . . ?”

“That’s not on, I’m afraid.”

“Can you get a search warrant, then?”

“If it comes to it, yes.”

St. James examined Lynley’s expression for a moment before he said, “But you hope it doesn’t come to that, I take it?”

“I’m not at all sure what I hope any longer” was Lynley’s reply.

VICTORIA

LONDON

He would have liked to talk to Barbara about what he’d learned from St. James. She’d been for years his go-to person when he wanted to toss round ideas in the course of an investigation. But it was unlikely that she would say anything, do anything, or admit to anything that might endanger Taymullah Azhar. So he was left to do his thinking alone.

It had been an excellent means of eliminating Angelina Upman. Once the small matter of no one else’s having been affected by the bacteria had been dealt with in one way or another, the road was clear to declaring her death an unfortunate result of food contamination by a virulent strain of bacteria that generally—if detected soon enough—killed no one. Complications from her pregnancy had prevented the doctors from realising what they were dealing with. As did Angelina’s own reluctance to stay in hospital once she finally took herself there. As did the fact that no one else who shared meals with her and no one else in Tuscany, for that matter, turned up in hospital with the same symptoms.

Someone must have seen how everything was going to play out, Lynley thought. That suggested Lorenzo Mura, but as to why he would wish to harm the woman who was carrying his child, the woman he loved and fully intended to marry . . . Unless, of course, all of his devotion was a front for something else.

He thought back over every encounter he’d had with the man. He could see the many ways in which Lorenzo had had the opportunity to mix the bacteria into Angelina’s food—the man was, after all, solicitous of her condition because of the pregnancy—but he couldn’t come up with how he’d got the stuff in the first place . . . until he remembered the man he’d seen at the fattoria when he’d first called there.

What had Lynley seen? A thick envelope handed from this unnamed man to Lorenzo Mura. What had Lorenzo declared? It was payment for one of the donkey foals he raised on the premises.

But what if that man had brought something other than money? Any possibility was one worth pursuing. Lynley picked up the phone and rang Salvatore Lo Bianco.

He had much to tell him anyway: He began with St. James’s visit to Taymullah Azhar’s lab, and he ended with the mystery man handing over an envelope to Lorenzo Mura at Fattoria di Santa Zita.

“Mura claimed it was cash for one of his foals. I thought nothing of it at the time, but if there’s actually no E. coli in Taymullah Azhar’s laboratory in London—”

“There is no E. coli now,” Salvatore replied. “But he would, of course, have no need of it now, would he, Ispettore?”

“I see that. He’d have had to be rid of whatever was left—if indeed there was any left—when he returned to London, having already managed to get Angelina to ingest whatever he’d taken to Italy. But here’s something else to consider, Salvatore. What if Angelina was not the intended victim?”

“Who, then?” Salvatore asked.

“Perhaps Azhar?”

“How was he to ingest this E. coli?”

“If Mura gave him something . . . ?”

“That he gave no one else? How would that have looked, my friend? ‘Eat this panino, signore, because you look hungry’? Or ‘Try this especial salsa di pomodoro on your pasta’? And how did he put his hands on E. coli? And if he put his hands on it, how would he poison the professor but have no one else affected?”

“I think we must find the man with the donkeys,” Lynley said.

“Who does what? Brew E. coli in his bathtub? Notice it crawling round the droppings of a cow or two? My friend, you try to bend what you’ve seen to fit what you hope. You forget Berlin.”

“What about it?”

“The conference that our microbiologist attended there. What was to prevent someone passing along to him a bit of this bacteria at the conference?”

“That was in April. She died weeks later.”

“Sì, but he has a lab, does he not? He keeps it there . . . however it is kept: warm, cold, boiling, freezing. I do not know. He labels it as something, I do not know what. But as you say, he is the head of this lab so no one is likely to bother anything labelled with the professor’s own writing. When it comes time to use it, he takes it with him to Italy.”

“But this presupposes he knew everything from the first: that Hadiyyah would be kidnapped, that Angelina would come in search of her, that he himself would go to Italy . . . If he’d been wrong about anything—especially about any move made by any of the principals—the plan would have crumbled.”

“As it has done, no?”

Lynley had to admit there was truth in this. He asked Salvatore what was next, although he had a feeling he already knew.

“I will pay a call upon the good professor. And in the meantime, I will have officers look into the work of all the people who attended that April conference in Berlin.”

LUCCA

ITALY

Salvatore decided not to have Taymullah Azhar come to the questura. He knew how quickly word would filter back to Piero Fanucci that he had done this. And while a conversation with the London professor had not been forbidden to him, he wanted any reports of what he did to go nowhere until he had more information. Once he’d directed Ottavia and Giorgio to look into the attendees at the Berlin conference, he set off for the anfiteatro. On his way, he phoned the London professor and told him in his very bad English to phone his avvocato.

They were waiting for him in the breakfast room of the pensione when Salvatore arrived. He asked where the child was. Had she gone back to Scuola Dante Alighieri?

She had not, he was told. After all, Azhar was anticipating a quick end to whatever matter had caused Salvatore to request his passport. Once clarity had been reached in this matter, they would depart as soon as they could. Sending her to school . . . ? This did not seem a reasonable idea since they would be leaving Italy so shortly.

Salvatore suggested two things at that point. The first was that adequate care for Hadiyyah needed to be arranged. The second was that he look closely at what Salvatore was about to show him.

He passed to the professor and his avvocato the copy of the card from Villa Rivelli. He watched closely as Azhar’s gaze fell upon it. There was nothing on his face. He turned the paper over to see if anything was written on the back of it, which Salvatore well recognised as a stalling tactic that gave him time to develop an explanation.

He said, “And so, Dottore?” to Azhar and waited for Aldo Greco’s translation of what the London man would say. Aldo shifted his buttocks, grimaced, passed gas, pardoned himself, and took up the document for an examination. He read it and handed it back to Azhar. Before Azhar could speak, Greco asked what this thing was and how Salvatore had come by it.

Salvatore had no problem with revealing either bit of information. It was a copy of a greeting card, he said. It had been found at the location where Hadiyyah Upman had been held after her abduction.

The card itself or the copy? Greco asked shrewdly.

The card, of course, Salvatore told him, which was still in the hands of the carabinieri who’d been called to Villa Rivelli by the Mother Superior. In due time the original would be sent to be included with any other gathered evidence.

“Do you recognise this, Dottore? It appears to be in your handwriting.”

Aldo Greco intervened at once. He said, “A handwriting expert has confirmed that, Ispettore? Surely you yourself are no expert in such a matter.”

Salvatore said that, certo, an expert would be employed by the police if things came to that. He himself was there merely to ascertain the provenance of this greeting card.

“Con permesso?” Salvatore concluded. He indicated with a nod at Azhar that he would be delighted to hear the London man’s reply should his avvocato deem such a thing a reasonable request.

Signor Greco said to Azhar, “Go ahead, Professore.”

Azhar said that he did not recognise the card or the message upon it. As to the handwriting . . . It looked similar to his own, he said, but handwriting could be copied by someone with the expertise to do so.

“You know, of course, that there are ways to discern a forgery from a real document,” Salvatore told him. “There are experts in forgery—forensic experts—who spend all day doing such work. They look for special signs, marks of hesitation that the true writer of something would not make in the course of penning a note. You know this, sì?”

“The professor is not an idiot,” Greco commented. “He has answered your question, Salvatore.”

Salvatore pointed out the word khushi. “And this?” he said to Azhar.

Azhar confirmed that it was his pet name for his daughter, something he had called her from the moment of her birth. It meant happiness, he explained.

“And this name khushi . . . you alone called her that?” And when Azhar confirmed that this was the case, “Just between the two of you?”

Azhar frowned. “I don’t . . . What exactly do you mean, Inspector?”

“I mean was this something said in private only?”

Azhar shook his head. “It was not a secret. Anyone who witnessed us together would know that this is what I call her.”

“Ah.” Salvatore nodded. It was nice to know in advance what direction Aldo Greco would take if things proceeded as he expected them to proceed. He took the copy of the card from Azhar and returned it to the manila envelope in which he’d carried it to the pensione. “Grazie, Professore,” he said.

In a movement that was nearly imperceptible, Azhar blew out a long breath. It was over, the expiration said, whatever “it” had been.

Aldo Greco, however, was not stupid. He said, “What else, Ispettore Lo Bianco?”

Salvatore smiled in acknowledgement of the attorney’s wisdom in this situation. He said to Azhar, “Now we speak of Berlin.”

“Berlin?”

Salvatore watched him closely as he nodded. “You told me there were many microbiologists in Berlin when you were there for your conference last month, vero?”

“What has Berlin to do with anything?” Greco asked as he translated Salvatore’s words.

“I think the professore knows very well what Berlin has to do with, Dottore,” Salvatore murmured.

“I do not,” Azhar said.

“Certo, you do,” Salvatore said expansively, his voice quite pleasant. “Berlin is your alibi for the moment of your daughter’s abduction, no? You have insisted upon that from the very first, and I will say that everything you claimed about Berlin has proven itself to be God’s own truth.”

“Then . . . ?” Greco asked with a glance at his watch. Time was of the essence, he was saying. His own time was far too valuable to be spent beating round bushes.

Salvatore said, “Tell me, Dottore, about the nature of this conference once again.”

“What has this to do with the matter in hand?” Signor Greco demanded. “If, as you say, the professor’s alibi has been confirmed for the time of his daughter’s kidnapping—”

“Sì, sì,” Salvatore said. “But now we speak of other things, my friend.” And with a look at Azhar, “Now we speak of the death of Angelina Upman.”

Azhar was absolute stone. It was as if his mind had begun screaming at once: do nothing, say nothing, wait, wait, wait. And this was good advice that his mind was giving him, Salvatore acknowledged silently. But the vein throbbing in his temple was betraying his body’s reaction to the change of subject.

An innocent man would have no such reaction, and Salvatore knew this. What he also thus knew was that the London professor was well aware that Angelina Upman’s death was far more than the result of an unfortunate misdiagnosis on the part of her doctors.

He’d very nearly got away with it. Just a few hours more on the day Salvatore had requested his passport and he’d have been back in London, from where only the lengthy and complicated process of extradition could have wrested him, if it managed to wrest him at all.

Greco said abruptly, “Say nothing,” to Azhar. Then he turned in his chair and went on to Salvatore with, “I insist that you explain yourself, Ispettore, before I allow my client to reply. What is this you’re now talking about?”

“I’m talking about murder,” Salvatore told him.

VICTORIA

LONDON

Lynley waited until late in the day to speak to Barbara Havers, two hours after Isabelle Ardery had buttonholed him in her office. She’d wanted to know how his “sorting out” was going, and who could blame her? On her watch, an officer under her command had gone off the rails and was, for all intents and purposes, continuing to do so. Lynley’s brief was to complete the incomplete picture of John Stewart’s reports on Barbara’s activities, but he didn’t know how to do it without sinking Barbara’s entire career.

Part of him was shouting that it bloody well deserved to be sunk. Her connection to Mitchell Corsico alone was enough to put her back in uniform. When one took into account everything else—from withholding information to outright lying about details relevant to a case—she was finished in police work. He knew this intellectually. It was emotionally that he couldn’t accept that there were consequences involved and that Barbara Havers had to face them. His heart was arguing that she’d had very good reasons for betraying every tenet of their profession and, in time, everyone would accept that.

That was, of course, the lie. Not only would everyone not accept it, it was a form of insanity on his part to expect them to do so. He himself couldn’t accept what she’d done. He wouldn’t, he knew, be in so much turmoil if he wholeheartedly embraced how Barbara had behaved.

He chose the Met’s library for his meeting with Barbara. Any other place and they would be seen. At this time of day, so late in the afternoon, it was unlikely that anyone else would be on the thirteenth floor. So he asked her to join him there, and there he waited. She came in reeking of cigarette smoke. She’d had a fag in one of the stairwells, another infraction but it mattered little set beside everything else that had been going on.

They walked to one of the windows. From here, the London Eye dominated the skyline, with each of its capsules crowded with spectators, and the spires of Parliament poked hopefully upward, towards a sky that today was the colour of old pewter. It exactly matched his mood, Lynley thought.

“Been there?” Havers said to him.

For a moment he didn’t know what she meant till he glanced at her and saw that she was looking upon the enormous Ferris wheel. He shook his head and told her he hadn’t. She nodded, said, “Neither have I. It’s the glass cars or whatever they are. I don’t think I’d fancy being inside with a crowd of tourists jostling each other to get a snap of Big Ben.”

“Ah. Yes.”

And then nothing. He turned from the view and took from his jacket pocket the copy of the greeting card that Salvatore Lo Bianco had sent to him. He handed it over to Barbara. She said, “What’s—” but her words faded as she read what was on it.

Lynley said to her, “Earlier, you told me that khushi was unfamiliar to you. This was found where Hadiyyah was kept hidden. Azhar has confirmed, by the way, that this khushi was his pet name for Hadiyyah. You’ve known the two of them how long, Barbara?”

“Who?” she asked, although she seemed to have some trouble with the word.

“Barbara . . .”

“All right. Two years this month. But you know that, don’t you, so why’re you asking?”

“Because I find it impossible to believe that in that time you never heard her father call her khushi. And yet that’s precisely what you asked me to believe. That and other things as well.”

“Anyone could have known—”

“Who, exactly?” Lynley felt the first piercings of an anger he’d been holding at bay since this entire miserable affair had begun. “Do you want to argue that Angelina Upman arranged for the kidnapping of her own daughter? Or Lorenzo Mura? Or . . . who else is there who ‘might have known,’ as you say, that her father called her khushi? An unidentified schoolmate, Barbara? A fellow nine-year-old with kidnap on his mind?”

“Bathsheba Ward would have known,” Barbara said. “If she posed as Azhar in emails to Hadiyyah, she would have called her khushi.”

“And then what, for God’s sake?”

“And then kidnapped her to hurt Angelina. Or to hurt Azhar. Or to . . . Bloody hell, I don’t know.”

“And she managed to duplicate his handwriting as well? Is that part of what you wish to argue? I’d like to hear the full story of how it all played out, from the moment that child went missing in Lucca to the moment her mother ended up in a grave.”

“He didn’t kill her!”

In frustration, Lynley walked away from her. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. He wanted to put his fist through a wall. He wanted to break one of the thirteenth-floor windows. Anything other than to have to continue this conversation with a woman so deliberately blind to what was before her. “For the love of God,” he tried a final time, “Barbara, can’t you see—”

“Those tickets to Pakistan,” she cut in. He could see that her upper lip had begun to sweat, and he reckoned she had her hands so tightly fisted in order to keep them from shaking. “They tell you that. Because why the bloody hell would Azhar purchase one-way tickets to Pakistan if he knew Angelina was going to be dead and Hadiyyah would be returned to him permanently?”

“Because he knew very well that when it came down to it, when everything finally met the light of day, you’d be standing there doing exactly what you’re doing: refusing to see what’s in front of your eyes. And you have to ask yourself why you’re doing that, Barbara, why you’re throwing away your career on the off chance that the rest of us won’t eventually hunt down every single detail that proves Taymullah Azhar was involved in each aspect of what’s happened to his daughter and what happened to Angelina Upman.”

At that, for a moment, he believed he’d got through to her. He believed that she would make a clean breast of everything she knew and everything she was hiding. She would do it, he thought, because she’d worked at his side for years, because she’d borne witness to what had led to the death of his wife and to what had followed, because she trusted him to have her best interests at heart, because she knew what was demanded of anyone who carried a warrant card and had a place at the Met.

She went back to the window and her fist pounded lightly on its sill. She said, “Those tickets to Pakistan suggest things. I see that, sir. As far as the kidnapping goes, those tickets and when they were bought and the fact that they are one-way only . . . They make things . . . difficult for Azhar. But you have to see they also eliminate him as a suspect for Angelina’s murder. Because with Angelina dead, he’d have no need to run to Pakistan with Hadiyyah. She’d been given back to him.”

“Which was his intention all along. And into Pakistan he could disappear with her if Angelina’s death was discovered as not an unfortunate and unexpected termination to a trying time but instead a carefully planned murder.”

He saw her swallow. She squinted against sunlight that was not there, to improve her vision which was already perfect. She said, “That’s not how it was. That’s not how it is.”

“You’re in love with him. Love causes people—”

“I am not. I. Am. Not.”

“Loves causes people,” he went determinedly on, “to lose their objectivity. You’re not the first person this has happened to, and God knows you won’t be the last. I want to help you, Barbara, but without a clean breast of everything on your part—”

“He’s innocent. She was taken from him, and he tried to find her, and he failed to find her, and then she was kidnapped, and only then did he know where she had been because Angelina showed up, accusing him like she always did, hating him like she always did, manipulating and scheming and leaving grief and chaos behind her and . . .” Her voice broke. “He did nothing. He did not do a bloody goddamn thing.”

“Barbara. Please.”

She shook her head. She swung away from him and left the room.

MARLBOROUGH

WILTSHIRE

They found a location that was central to both of them in Wiltshire, at an inn just east of the town. In a copse of beech trees, it sat well off the road, half-timbered and brick with a sloping, ancient slate roof. In its car park Lynley waited for forty-five minutes until Daidre Trahair managed to get there from Bristol.

By the time she arrived, the car park was crowded, so she left her car in the remaining bay, which was farthest from the inn’s front door. He was out of the Healey Elliott and at her car door before she had switched off the ignition. As she glanced up at him, he realised that he had been quite desperate to see her. She was, indeed, the only person he’d even wished to see at the end of his conversation with Barbara Havers.

He said simply, “Thank you,” as he and she opened the car door together.

She said as she got out, “Of course, Thomas. It was no trouble at all.”

“I expect you’ve left a commitment behind in Bristol.”

She smiled. “The Broads will practise quite well without me tonight.”

They hugged. He took in the scent of her hair and the vague and subtle perfume of her skin. He said, “You’ve not dined, have you?” And when she shook her head, “Shall we, then? I’ve no idea what the food will be like, but the atmosphere looks promising.”

They entered the place. It was ages old, with a sloping floor of oak and small diamond-paned windows. A panelled dining room opened off Reception. A teetering stairway led to rooms up above. Although the restaurant was nearly full, they had luck. Someone had just cancelled a booking, so if they didn’t mind sitting near the fireplace . . . ? No fire at this time of year, however.

Lynley would have sat on one of the stair treads. He looked at Daidre and she nodded at him with a smile. She had a smudge on her spectacles, which he found endearing. Her sandy hair was somewhat in disarray. She’d come on the run. He wanted to thank her again for her kindness, but instead he followed the maitre d’ into the dining room.

A drink?

Yes.

Sparkling water?

That as well.

The night’s specials?

Indeed.

Menus?

Please.

Then followed the business of ordering. He wasn’t hungry, but she was. Doubtless, she’d been wrestling large animals for most of the day. A rhino with piles, a kangaroo with a swollen ankle, a hippo with kidney stones. God knew. So he ordered a meal he would only pick at so that she would feel free to order in a similar fashion. She did so, and the waiter disappeared, and then they were alone with each other. She looked at him expectantly. Obviously, an explanation was in order.

“Terrible day,” he said to her. “You’re the antidote for it.”

“Oh dear.”

“To which part?”

“The terrible day part. I’m rather pleased to be its antidote, I think.”

“Think but not know?”

She cocked her head at him. She removed her spectacles and cleaned them of their smudges on her linen napkin. She said when she returned them to her nose, “Ah. I can see you now.”

“And your reply?”

She fingered her cutlery, straightening it unnecessarily. She was, as he was learning about her, as always carefully considering her answer. “That’s just the problem. The think-but-not-know part. At any rate, it’s lovely to see you. C’n I help in some way? I mean, with the day?”

He found of a sudden that he didn’t want their evening to be about Barbara Havers and what she’d been up to. He found that he wished to let that sleeping dog lie, if only for the hours he had to spend with Daidre. So instead he asked her about the job she’d been offered at London Zoo. Had she reached a decision about transplanting herself, uprooting her life, and abandoning Boadicea’s Broads for the Electric Magic?

She said, “A lot depends on what Mark says about the contract. I’ve not heard from him yet.”

“How might Mark feel about your leaving Bristol if you’re leaning in that direction?”

“Well, obviously, there are thousands of solicitors in London waiting for someone like me to come along and hire them for the messy bits of life.”

“Yes. But that’s not what I meant.”

Their sparkling water arrived at the table, along with a bottle of wine. The ceremony of opening this, presenting the cork, tasting, and nodding approval was gone through. The wine was poured for both of them before Daidre replied.

“What’re you asking, Thomas?”

He rolled the stem of his wineglass in his fingers. “I suppose I’m asking if there’s any point to my seeing you . . . aside from our conversations which I do enjoy.”

She looked at her wine as she began her answer. It took a moment as she was not glib and did not pretend to be. “When it comes to you, I’m at war with my better judgement.”

“Meaning what?”

“That my better judgement has been insisting that my life is better kept in order through devotion to mammals who can’t speak. I became a veterinarian for a reason, you see.”

He took this in and evaluated it, turning it this way and that for every meaning he could wrest from it. He settled on saying, “But you can’t expect to go through life untouched by your fellow man, can you? You can’t want that.”

Their starters arrived: freshly smoked Irish salmon for her, a Caprese salad for him. It was far too large. What had he been thinking in ordering it?

She said, “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? I can want that. Anyone can want it. There’s part of me, Tommy—”

“You’ve just called me Tommy.”

“Thomas.”

“I prefer the other.”

“I know. And please, it was inadvertent. You’re not meant to think—”

“Daidre, nothing is inadvertent.”

Her head lowered as, perhaps, she took this in. She seemed to be gathering her thoughts. She finally looked up, and her eyes were bright. Candlelight, he thought. It was only the candles. She said, “Let’s leave that for another discussion. What I was intending to say is that there’s a part of me that always fails within a relationship. Failure myself to thrive, failure to provide what the other person needs to thrive as well. It’s always come down to that in the end for me, and it probably always will, if my personal history is anything to go by. There’s a part of me that can’t be touched, you see, and that means defeat for anyone who tries to get at the heart of who I am.”

“Can’t or won’t?” he asked her.

“What?”

“Be touched. Can’t or won’t be touched?”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m an independent sort. Well, I’ve had to be, coming into the middle-class world as I did.”

She didn’t amplify, but she didn’t need to. He knew her background because she’d shown it to him: the decrepit caravan from which she and her siblings had been removed by the government from the care of their parents, the fostering system into which they’d been placed, her own adoption and her change of identity. He knew it all, and it didn’t matter a whit to him. But that was hardly the point.

She said, “I’ll always have that part of me, and that’s what keeps me . . . untouchable, I suppose, is the word.”

“Because your family were travellers?”

“If they’d only been travellers, Tommy.”

He let the name go.

“At least there’s a culture involved with travellers. There’s a tradition, a history, families, whatever. We didn’t have that. All we had was my father’s . . . What do we want to call it? His compulsion? His mad insistence on what he was going to do with his life? That led us to where we ended up. That led us to why we were taken from him and from my mother and from that terrible place . . .” Her eyes grew brighter. She looked away from him at the empty fireplace.

Lynley said quickly, “Daidre. It’s perfectly—”

“No, it isn’t. It can never be. It’s part of who I am and this . . . this untouchable part of me seeks to honour it, I suppose. But it always gets in the way.”

He said nothing. He allowed her the moment to regain her composure, sorry that he had pushed her to this point, which was always the point of departure for the two of them even though he would not have it that way.

She looked back at him, her expression fond. “It isn’t you, you know. It isn’t who you are or how you grew up or what you owe to several hundred years of your family’s history. It’s me. And the fact that I have no family history at all. At least not one that I’m aware of or was told about. I suspect, on the other hand, that you can recite your forebears back to the time of the Tudors.”

“Hardly.” He smiled. “The Stuarts, perhaps, but not the Tudors.”

“You see,” she said. “You know the Stuarts. Tommy, there are actually people out there”—she waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the windows, by which she meant the outside world—“who have no idea who the Stuarts are. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Daidre, I read history. It’s nothing more than that. And you called me Tommy again. I think you’ve begun to protest too much. And yes, yes, I know it’s Hamlet’s mother and don’t tell me it signifies anything more than people saying ‘There’s the rub’ because you and I both know that it doesn’t. And even if it did, what does it matter at the end of the day?”

“It matters to me,” she said. “It’s what keeps me apart.”

“From whom?”

“From everyone. From you. And besides that . . . After what happened to you, you need—no, you deserve—someone who is one hundred percent there for you.”

He took some wine and thought about this. She worked on her salmon for a moment. He watched her. He finally said, “That hardly sounds healthy. No one actually wants a parasite. I tend to think it’s only in films that we get the idea men and women are supposed to find—what do they call it?—soul mates with whom they march into the future, blissfully joined at the hip.”

She smiled, it seemed, in spite of herself. “You know what I mean. You deserve someone who is willing and able to be one hundred percent for you, open to you, accepting of you . . . whatever you want to call it. I’m not that person, and I don’t think I could be.”

Her declaration felt like the thinnest of rapiers. It slid without effort under his skin, barely felt until the bleeding began. “So what are you saying, exactly?”

“I hardly know.”

“Why?”

She looked at him. He tried to read whatever he could on her face, but time and circumstance had made her guarded, and he couldn’t blame her for the walls she built. She said, “Because you’re not an easy man to walk away from, Tommy. So I’m very much aware of the necessity of walking away and the marked reluctance I feel about doing so.”

He nodded. For a moment they ate as the sounds of the dining room rose and fell around them. Plates were removed. Other plates came. He finally said, “Let’s leave it at that, for now.”

Later, after a shared pudding of something called chocolate death gateau followed by coffee, they left the place. Nothing had been resolved between them and yet the sense of having moved forward was something that Lynley couldn’t ignore. They walked to her car arm in arm, and before she unlocked it and prepared to drive away, she stepped easily and naturally into his arms.

Just as easily, he kissed her. Just as easily, her lips parted to his and the kiss lingered. He felt a tremendous desire for her: partly the animal lust that drove their species, partly spiritual longing that happened when a soul recognised the immortal worth of another soul.

The inn has rooms, he wanted to say. Climb those stairs with me, Daidre, and come to bed.

Instead he said nothing but “Good night, dear friend.”

“Good night, dear Tommy” was her reply.