Just One Evil Act

15 May

CHALK FARM

LONDON

Barbara’s mobile rang as she was showering, trying to wash off not only her feeling of dread but also the stench of cigarette smoke. Her nerves had been raw for more than forty-eight hours now, and only one fag after another had done anything to calm them. She’d gone through four packets of Players and as a result her lungs were making her feel like a woman being tried for witchcraft: A huge stone the approximate size of the Isle of Man sat on her chest, demanding a confession of her misdeeds.

When the mobile rang, she leapt from the shower. She grabbed it, it slipped out of her fingers, and she watched in horror as it launched towards the tiled floor, where it lost its battery and whoever had been ringing her. She cursed, grabbed a towel, rescued the mobile, and put it back together. She looked to see who the caller had been. She recognised Mitchell Corsico’s number. She rang him back at once, sitting on the loo and dripping water onto the floor.

“What’ve you got?” she asked.

“Good morning to you too” was his reply. “Or I s’pose I should say bone jorno.”

“You’re in Italy?” she asked. Thank God. The next step was moulding the story he would write.

“Let’s put it this way: Il grande formaggio—that would be Rodney Aronson over in Fleet Street, by the way—wasn’t exactly chuffed to cough up the funds to get me here, so my expense account is large enough for one slice of focaccia and a cup of espresso each day. I have to sleep on a park bench—praise God there’re dozens of them up on the city wall, at least—unless I spring for a hotel room myself. But other than that, yeah, I’m in Italy, Barb.”

“And?” she said.

“And the good professor spent part of yesterday at the local nick. They call it a questura here, by the way. He was there with his solicitor in the afternoon, and they left for dinner, which made me think things might not be what they seemed. But then he was back with the same bloke in tow, and in they went for another few hours. I tried to have a word with him in the afters, but he wasn’t giving.”

“What about Hadiyyah?” Barbara asked him anxiously.

“Who?”

“His daughter, Mitchell. The one who was kidnapped? Where is she? What’s happened to her? He can’t have left her all alone for a day in some hotel room while he talked to the cops.”

“P’rhaps not. But the way things are looking, Barb, he sure as hell did something and he surer as hell doesn’t want to have a chat about it with me. No one has a whisper about E. coli, by the way. There’s four journalists I’ve run into—these’re Italians as I’m the only Brit mad enough to be here—and they speak good English and they haven’t heard a word about E. coli. So I’m going to lay something out for you here. This E. coli business: truth or lie? I mean, I’ve had a think in the last twenty-four, and it seems to me you’re not above sending your best mate Mitchell on a wild-goose chase for your own reasons. You’re not doing that, are you? Better reassure me or things won’t look good for you.”

“Aside from all of that being rubbish on a scone, you’ve already printed those pictures of me, Mitchell. What else can you do?”

“Print them up with the dates on them this time round, darling. Send them off to your guv and see what happens next. Hey, you and I know you’ve been working this situation from every wrong angle because you and the professor—”

“Don’t bloody go there,” she said. It was bad enough she’d had to go there with Lynley. She had no intention of entertaining her supposed love for Azhar as a subject with Mitch Corsico. “The E. coli story is solid. I told you that much. I had it from DI Lynley. I was sitting right at his dining room table when he got it and he got it directly from Italy from a bloke called Lo Bianco. Chief Inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco. He’s the cop who—”

“Yeah, yeah. I know who he is. Pulled from the kidnapping case for incompetence, Barb. Did Lynley tell you that? I reckon not, eh? So this Lo Bianco drops a fanciful word about E. coli as a bit of you-know-what.”

“Revenge for being pulled from the kidnapping case? A way to muddy the waters? Don’t be stupid. And the E. coli business has nothing to do with the kidnapping anyway. It’s a separate issue. The Italians don’t want it hitting the press. That’s your story so bloody go after it. You can’t think Azhar’s been questioned for hours because of a kidnapping that everyone knows he had no part in. They have someone under arrest for the kidnapping, for the love of God. Far as I know, they’ve got two blokes under arrest for it. This is another issue and the last thing the Italians want is for the information to get out. It panics people. No one buys Italian. Their exports get held for testing and the veg rots in port and the fruit goes soft. ’F they pin the E. coli business on a single person—which, believe me, they’re intent on doing come hell or you-know-what—they don’t have to worry. They call it murder and Bob’s the rest of it. That’s your story.” So bloody well write it, she thought, so that the Italian press would pick up on it, run with it, and batter the cops till the real source of the E. coli was located. Because the one thing she could and would absolutely bet her life on was that Azhar had nothing to do with Angelina Upman’s death.

On his end of the call, Mitch Corsico was acting thoughtful. He hadn’t got to where he was without being careful with his stories. He might be employed by a deplorable rag that was more suitable for lining rubbish bins than it was for printing valuable information, but he didn’t intend to spend his entire career at The Source, so he had a reputation for accuracy that he had to maintain. He said, “Seems to me you’re not thinking this through. Far ’s I can tell, there’s not a hint of pasta-eating lads and lasses dropping like flies because of some mass food poisoning over here unless the health officials for the whole effing country’re in on a cover-up, which, you ask me, isn’t bloody likely. So are you trying to suggest the Upman woman dipped into a plate of steaming E. coli on her own?”

“Who knows how high the cover-up goes? For all we know, there are other E. coli victims and no one is talking about them.”

“Bollocks. There’ll be laws about that. Reporting a potential epidemic or something. Like when someone shows up in casualty coughing blood and bloody-hell-we’ve-got-a-case-of-TB-on-our-hands. They don’t let that go. They wouldn’t let this go.”

Barbara jammed her fingers into her wet hair. She looked round for her fags, didn’t see them, realised that she hadn’t brought them into the bathroom, remembered that she’d had a shower primarily to wash the stench of them off her, and wanted one anyway.

She said, “Mitchell? Will you listen to me? Or at least to yourself? One way or another you’ve got a story, so why the hell don’t you bloody write it?”

“I expect it comes down to my not quite trusting you.”

“Christ. What more do I sodding have to tell you?”

“Why you’re so hot to have this story hit the paper for a start.”

“Because they should be telling their own papers about it and they’re not. They’re not warning anyone. They’re not looking for the source.”

“Uh . . . That’s where you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. You and I both know why the professor’s been stuck in the questura. This conversation’s gone back to where it started. He was there yesterday. Chances are very good he’ll be there today, and ’f you ask me, there’s a pretty good chance they’re not talking to him about how he likes the weather in Tuscany and the farro soup in Lucca. Come on, Barb. I did a little digging on our good professor: the ins, the outs, and the whereabouts. He was rubbing elbows with his fellow bacteria lovers just last month. Berlin, this was. Now, if I know that—because it wasn’t exactly a top secret, eyes-only confab, Barb—the cops know that. They find someone among that crowd who’s studying E. coli and it’s one hell of a very short trip from that information to someone passing along a petri dish of that stuff to Azhar for use on his lover.”

“Mitchell. Are you listening to me?”

“Okay. His former lover, if that’s where I’ve gone wrong.”

“Stop it,” she said. “Have you been listening? This is a story in which the Italian health services and the Italian police—”

“Barb, you’re the one not listening. Uncle Mitchell here has colleagues there. Where you are. In London. And those colleagues have sources elsewhere, even in Berlin. And their sources in Berlin have easy access to that conference of bacteria bigwigs. And what do you think they’ve uncovered for me? In twenty-four hours, Barb, so you can rest bloody well assured that the Italian coppers will be right behind them.”

Barbara’s throat was so tight that she could barely get the word out. “What?”

“We’ve got a woman from University of Glasgow who’s a major player in the E. coli field. We’ve got a bloke from University of Heidelberg who’s right behind her. Both of them have serious operations going in laboratories on their home patches. And both of them were at the conference. You can connect the dots on that one if you want to.”

No, Barbara thought. No, no, no.

She said, and she tried to sound determined, “You’re heading in the wrong direction. This is a woman who had more than one lover at a time. She had Azhar and another bloke while she was living with Azhar here in London. And then she had Lorenzo Mura as well. Three lovers at once. She left Azhar for Lorenzo Mura and I’m telling you that it’s a fairly sure thing she picked up someone over there once the fires burnt low with Mura. That’s who she was.”

“You’re slithering all over the map, Barb. You can’t be trying to tell me this bird had a former lover with access to E. coli and a current lover with access as well. How d’you expect that ship to get out of port? And you’re contradicting yourself anyway. This is either a grand Italian cover-up or it’s cold-blooded murder, but it isn’t both.”

She was as out of ideas as she was out of steam. She was reduced to saying the one thing she knew had no chance at all of winning him to her thoughts. She said, “Mitchell, please.”

He said pleasantly, “At the end of the day, this is going to be a very big story, so I s’pose I have to thank you, Barb. I give it another twenty-four hours before they arrest him. They call that indagato here. The coppers turn their eyes on you as the principal suspect and the news goes out and you’re indagato. Taking his passport was the first step. That’s the second. So you put me on to a very big story, Barb. Rod might even increase my expense account to include a plate of spaghetti Bolognese.”

“You’ll destroy him if you start speculating about him in the press. You know that, right? You’ve already done the Love Rat Dad piece. Wasn’t that enough? You’ve got nothing but circumstantial rubbish to build a story on.”

“True enough,” he said. “But circumstantial rubbish is our bread and butter. You knew that when you brought me on board.”

VICTORIA

LONDON

Barbara forced herself to eat. She even went for something with more nutritional validity than her usual fare. In place of a strawberry Pop-Tart, she opted for a soft-boiled egg and brown toast. She gave in to jam, but that was it. She felt virtuous for five minutes until she sicked up the entire mess.

Luckily that happened before she left Chalk Farm for the Met. She was forced to change her tee-shirt and scrub her teeth and mouth three times. But none of that resulted in her being late for work, which she reckoned counted in her favour.

She tried not to smoke en route. She failed. She tried to divert her mind with chat from Radio 4. She failed. Twice she came close to finding herself on the responsibility end of a roadway crash. She self-talked and tried to get her breath even and her heart beating normally. She failed there as well.

She had two fags in the underground car park, the first to still her nerves and the second to build her courage. What she was attempting to come to terms with was having saved Azhar from a kidnapping charge only to have him charged with murder. In the realm of pyrrhic victories, she reckoned she’d just been crowned its bloody empress.

And where was Hadiyyah? What in God’s name had been done with Hadiyyah if Azhar was spending hours on the grill in gaol?

She’d rung his mobile: twice before she left her bungalow in Chalk Farm, once on her way to Victoria Street, and a final time in the underground car park. No reply told her he was probably back at the questura, as Mitch had predicted. What she couldn’t understand was why he had not rung to tell her what was going on.

She couldn’t work out what this meant except that he didn’t want her to know he was being questioned in the first place. He’d already deceived her about his participation in Hadiyyah’s kidnapping. It wasn’t inconceivable that he’d not wanted her to know he was being questioned about Angelina’s death.

What she didn’t want to toss round in her mind was whether she ought to be concluding that he was involved. Instead, she concentrated on Hadiyyah and on the state of fear and confusion the little girl had to be in. Her young life was in shambles. In six short months, she’d gone through more than most children endure in a lifetime. After being snatched from her father and taken to Italy, after being kidnapped and held for days at an obscure location in the Italian Alps, after losing her mother . . . now her father was under suspicion for murder? How was she to navigate this? How was she to navigate it alone?

When Barbara reached her desk, she checked for messages. She saw that she was under the watchful eye of John Stewart as usual, but that couldn’t be helped. Finding nothing that gave her a clue about Italy and Azhar, she went to see Detective Superintendent Ardery. There was only one way to move forward, she reckoned, and she was going to need Ardery’s blessing to do it.

She rang Azhar’s mobile a final time. She even rang the pensione where he was staying, only to discover that the woman who picked up the call spoke not a single word of English. She was great with her Italian, though. Once she heard Barbara’s voice and Taymullah Azhar, she was off like a jackrabbit, flooding the airwaves with a recitation that could have been anything from a recipe for minestrone to a declamation on the state of the world. Who bloody knew? Barbara finally rang off on her and then there was nothing for it but to go in search of Superintendent Ardery.

She thought of taking DI Lynley with her, in the hope that he might be able to soften up the superintendent with a display of careful reasoning. However, not only was Lynley not yet in for the day—why the bloody hell not? she wondered—but she also had to admit to herself that she couldn’t rely upon him to be in her corner. Too much water had passed under that bridge in the past few weeks.

When Dorothea Harriman turned from her keyboard at the sound of her name, Barbara clocked her expression immediately. Dee’s gaze took in the tee-shirt Barbara had quickly donned after sicking up her breakfast, and Barbara could tell that, while Dee might have been mildly amused by its declaration of Heavily Medicated for Your Safety, chances were very good that Isabelle Ardery was not going to be. Barbara cursed silently. She’d grabbed the tee-shirt without considering anything other than getting herself to the Met as quickly as she could without splashes of vomit on her chest. She should have read the slogan, she should have selected more wisely, she should have dressed in a suit. Or a skirt. Or something. She had not, and so she was starting out on her saunter into Ardery’s territory on one hell of a wrong foot.

Briefly, she considered asking Dee to exchange tops with her. Ludicrous prospect, she decided. Even picturing the young woman decked out in a slogan-bearing tee-shirt was itself an impossibility. So she merely asked if the guv was available. Before Dee could answer, Barbara heard Isabelle Ardery’s voice.

“Of course I’m in agreement that they oughtn’t come to town by train, alone,” she was saying, “but I didn’t mean alone, Bob. Is there any reason that Sandra can’t accompany them? I’ll be at the station. She can hand them over to me and take the return train to Kent. I’ll do the same at the end of the visit.”

Barbara looked at Dee. Dee mouthed ex-husband. The guv was negotiating time with her twin sons, in the custody of the ex for reasons of breathing the fine air of Kent. Or so Ardery claimed when anyone enquired why her children didn’t live in London with their mum. Which very few people had the nerve to do. Well, this didn’t look like a good time to approach the superintendent, but that couldn’t be helped. Barbara lurked outside her superior’s office till she heard Ardery say, “All right. The following weekend, then. I think by now that I’ve proved myself, don’t you? . . . Bob, please don’t be unreasonable . . . Will you at least talk to Sandra about this? Or I can do so . . . Yes . . . Very well.”

That was it, the conversation’s conclusion making it difficult to know which way the wind of Ardery’s mood was going to be blowing. But Barbara had no choice, so she went ahead when Dee Harriman gave her the nod. She got a look at Ardery’s face as she entered, though, and she reckoned at once that things weren’t going to go swimmingly for her.

Ardery sat with her fist clenched to her teeth, giving a living illustration of the term white-knuckled. She was definitely white-knuckling something, and Barbara reckoned it was probably rage as the superintendent was taking deep breaths and her eyes were closed. Good moment to decamp, Barbara thought, but Hadiyyah’s well-being hung in the balance. So she cleared her throat and said, “Guv? Dee told me you could see me for a minute.”

Ardery’s eyes opened. She lowered her fist, and Barbara saw that her nails had deeply indented her palms. She reckoned the other woman’s blood was pounding. She wished she’d waited for Lynley’s tempering influence.

Ardery said, “What is it, Sergeant?” and the tone of her voice indicated that mentioning the overheard phone call would be a very bad idea.

“I need to go to Italy.” Barbara winced inwardly at the way it sounded. She’d blurted it out instead of what she’d planned to do, which was to lead Ardery gently through all the facts so that being given leave to go to Italy would be the natural conclusion of the tale she would tell. But that had gone by the wayside as she’d opened her mouth. Urgency demanded an immediate response.

“What?” Ardery said. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t heard Barbara’s announcement, though. It was as if she couldn’t believe it and by making Barbara repeat it, she would be forcing her subordinate to hear how ridiculous her expectations were.

Barbara said again, “I need to go to Italy, guv.” She added, “To Tuscany. To Lucca. Hadiyyah Upman’s been left alone there, her dad’s been questioned for the last two days, he has no family he can rely on, and I’m the only person Hadiyyah trusts. After what’s happened, I mean.”

Ardery listened to this without expression. When Barbara had finished, the superintendent took a manila file from her desk. She laid it out in front of her. Barbara saw something written on its tab, but she couldn’t make out what it was. What she could make out was the paperwork inside. There was quite a stack of it, and included among it were clippings from newspapers. She thought at first that the guv meant to review what had happened to Hadiyyah or to look up information that would tell her what was going on with Azhar. But she took neither action. Instead, she gazed at Barbara levelly. She said, “That’s absolutely out of the question.”

Barbara swallowed. She presented the facts. Angelina Upman’s unexpected death; E. coli; a possible cover-up by the Italian police, the Italian health officials, and the Italian media; Azhar’s passport in the possession of the coppers; Azhar’s solicitor; daylong interviews at the questura; Hadiyyah alone and afraid, kidnapped first, held in the Alps second, mother dead third, father under the cops’ microscope for the last two days fourth. Hadiyyah needed to be cared for until this situation was settled. Or she needed to be returned to London in the event—God forbid—that it wasn’t settled today. The child had no one in Italy save her father and—

“This isn’t a British affair.”

Barbara’s mouth gaped. “These are British subjects!”

“And there’s a system in place that comes to their aid in foreign countries. It’s called the embassy.”

“The embassy only gave him a list of solicitors. They said that when someone gets into trouble with the law—”

“This is an Italian matter, and the Italians will handle it.”

“By doing what? Putting Hadiyyah into care? Swallowing her up into the system? Handing her over to some . . . some . . . some workhouse?”

“We’re not living inside a Charles Dickens novel, Sergeant.”

“Orphanage, then. Holding tank. Dormitory. Convent. Guv, she’s nine years old. She has no one. Only her dad.”

“She has family here in London and they’ll be notified. And I expect her mother’s lover will be notified as well. The lover will take her in till the family can fetch her.”

“They hate her! She’s not even a person to them. Guv, for God’s sake, she’s been through enough.”

“You’re getting hysterical.”

“She needs me.”

“No one needs you, Sergeant.” And then as if she’d seen Barbara recoil as from a blow, “What I mean is that your presence isn’t necessary and I won’t authorise it. The Italians are well equipped to handle this, and they will do so. Now if that’s all, I’ve work to do and I expect you’re in the same position.”

“I can’t just stand by and—”

“Sergeant, if you wish to argue this matter further, I suggest you have a think first. I also suggest that you begin your think with a few considerations about a gentleman called Mitchell Corsico as well as The Source and about what you might be able to learn from past history. Cops have climbed into bed with reporters in the past. The results have been less than pleasant. Not for the reporters, of course. Scandal is their stock in trade. But for the cops? Hear me well, Barbara, because I mean it: I suggest you consider your own recent history and what it has to tell you about your future if you don’t sort yourself out at once. Now is there anything further?”

“No,” Barbara said. There was no point to additional conversation with the guv. The only point was getting herself to Italy, which she fully intended to do.

SOUTH HACKNEY

LONDON

First, however, there were matters to settle with Bryan Smythe. The last time she’d seen him, she’d given him his marching orders. She hadn’t heard from him about having done the work required. She’d phoned him twice with no success. It was time, she reckoned, to jostle his bones with a reminder of what could befall him if she had a word with the appropriate authorities about what he was up to when he sat down daily at his computer.

She found him at home. He was not, however, at work on anything. Instead he was apparently dressing for going out. He’d done something about the dandruff, praise God, because at least for the moment his shoulders were devoid of the flakes of Maldon sea salt that otherwise had sprinkled his shirts when she’d seen him previously. He was also wearing a jacket and tie. The fact that he came to the door with keys in hand suggested that she’d caught him in the nick of time.

She didn’t wait to be admitted into his sanctum sanctorum. She said, “I won’t be requiring a cuppa this time,” and she sauntered past him, through his work area and into the garden once again. She chose another spot this time. Knowing the bloke’s habits as she was learning them, she had little doubt that after her last meeting with him in the garden, he’d wired that earlier area for sound.

At the end of all the fine plantings, she spied a garden shed, disguised with a heavy growth of wisteria in such full bloom that she reckoned he fed it with the ground-up remains of the neighbourhood’s missing pets. She headed in that direction, and he followed her. “Let me ask in advance,” he said to her. “What part of ‘you’re trespassing on private property’ might be too difficult for you to understand?”

“Where are you with making the changes on the tickets to Pakistan?” she demanded.

“You can leave or I can phone the local cops.”

“We both know you’re not about to do that. What’ve you done about those tickets?”

“I don’t have time to talk about this. I’ve an employment interview to go to.”

“‘Employment interview,’ is it? What sort of employment does a bloke with your talents come up with?”

“I’ve been headhunted by a Chinese firm. For tech security. Which is what I do. Which is what I have been doing for the better part of fifteen years. If you must know.”

“That’s kept you in expensive art in the modern mode, has it?” she asked archly, indicating his house and its collection.

“Let’s be straight with each other” was his reply. “You’ve done your best to destroy the better part of my career—”

“Such as it was, although it’s a bit like hearing a cat burglar complaining because someone’s had the bollocks to put a security system on their house. But do go ahead.”

“So I owe you nothing. And nothing is what I have to offer you.” He glanced at his watch. “Now if there’s nothing more . . . and traffic being what it is . . .”

“You’re bluffing, Bryan. I’m holding a better hand than you are, or have you forgotten that? Now what’s been done about those Pakistan tickets?”

“I told you there was no way to get into SO12’s system, and there’s no way to get into SO12’s system. Surely you’re capable of understanding that.”

“What I’m also capable of understanding is there are other blokes exactly like you out there in cyberland, and you know each other bloody well. And don’t tell me there’s no one out there who could hop, skip, and jump their way into SO12’s system because on a daily basis these blokes hack into everything from the Ministry of Defence to Inland Revenue to the Royals’ social calendars. So if you haven’t found someone to do the job, it’s because you haven’t asked someone to do the job. And in your position, that’s risky, Bryan. I’m holding your backups. I could sink you in a minute. Have you forgotten that?”

He shook his head, not an I’ve-not-forgotten movement but one that signalled disbelief. He said, “You can do what you like, but I think, if you do, you’ll find out soon enough that all of us are cooking in the same pot just now. And that would be largely due to you.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“First of all, you’ve been bloody stupid to think that Dwayne intends to take the fall for anything. Second of all, if some records can be altered—superficially or otherwise—others can be altered as well. So what I’m suggesting is that you might want to have a think about that one. And when you’ve finished your thinking, you can get on to third of all. Which is, you stupid cow, that you’ve been found out. What’s known is every movement you’ve made, I suspect, but especially the movement that led you to my front door.”

He turned on his heel at that and headed through the sumptuous spring garden and back towards his house.

She followed him, saying, “What’s that supposed to mean besides an idle threat?”

He swung back to her. “It means I had a visit from the Met. Do I need to say more? Because you and I know there’s only one way that could have happened and I’m looking at her.”

“I didn’t grass you up,” she told him.

He barked a laugh. “I’m not saying you did. You were followed here, you bloody fool. You’ve probably been followed since you first got involved in this mess, and you’ve been turned in to the higher-ups. Now, do I escort you to the door or do I strong-arm you? I’m happy to do either, but in any case, I’ve an interview to get to and whatever business you and I had, believe me, it’s finished.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

In his entire career, Salvatore Lo Bianco had never withheld evidence in the course of an investigation. The very idea was anathema to him. Yet that was the position he found himself in, so he invented a reason for this that he could live with, which was simplicity itself as well as actually being true: He needed to find a forensic handwriting specialist to compare the words on the greeting card that had been given to Hadiyyah to the remarks Taymullah Azhar had made on the comment card at Pensione Giardino. While that was being done, he decided, there was no real reason to make the existence of this piece of possible evidence known to anyone.

Prior to leaving for Piazza Grande, Salvatore had a word with the resourceful Ottavia Schwartz. Along with Giorgio Simione, she was continuing to make progress—albeit tedious progress—on the matter of the attendees at the Berlin conference. The fact that they were an international group made things difficult but not impossible. She showed him the list of names they’d ticked off the list, their specialities accounted for. She and Giorgio had not come up with anyone who was doing research on E. coli, she told him, but there were many names left, and she had confidence that among the remaining scientists, she would find someone significant.

Salvatore left the questura. He took with him the most recent information that the London private detective had sent to Lucca. Accompanying this were the earlier records of Michelangelo’s bank account that he’d unearthed. His intention was to use both sets of these documents to play Piero Fanucci like a mandolin.

Il Pubblico Ministero was in, the man’s secretary confirmed upon Salvatore’s arrival at Palazzo Ducale. She disappeared into Fanucci’s office and returned momentarily with the word that certo, il magistrato would not only see him but would wish him to know that he always had time for his old friend Salvatore Lo Bianco. She gave this news to Salvatore expressionlessly since years of working for Piero had allowed her to master the art of delivering information without irony.

Piero was waiting for him behind his impressive desk. It was scattered with papers and manila filing folders thick and dog-eared, heavy with grave and important contents. It wasn’t Salvatore’s intention to add to this collection. What he’d brought into the room with him, he intended to remove. As he would remove himself once Piero’s cooperation was secured.

Il Pubblico Ministero said nothing about Salvatore’s appearance. His face was still bruised but improving daily. Soon all evidence of their encounter in the botanical gardens would be gone, but Salvatore was glad that his skin was still marred. In this situation, he hoped that a reminder of their encounter would be helpful.

He said, “Piero, it appears that you have been right all along in the approach you have taken. I wish you to know that I see it now.”

Fanucci’s eyes narrowed. They moved from Salvatore’s face to the folders he had in his hand. He didn’t say anything, but he nodded brusquely and indicated with a wave of his six-fingered hand that Salvatore could continue.

Salvatore presented him with the first folder. This contained all of the information that Dwayne Doughty had sent to Lucca from London: receipts, statements, and reports. Since they suggested a landscape of guilt that tied Taymullah Azhar to Michelangelo Di Massimo and pinned culpability on both men for the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Upman, it looked, superficially of course, as if Salvatore was mocking the magistrato with his affirmation of the correctness of Piero’s approach. Piero—nobody’s fool when it came to matters touching upon himself—flared his nostrils. He said, “Che cos’è?” and waited for elucidation.

Elucidation came in the form of the earlier material Salvatore had gleaned. This comprised the bank statements and phone records of the dead Roberto Squali and the same of Michelangelo Di Massimo. Set alongside the new material provided by Signor Doughty, it was only too apparent that the London private investigator, for reasons unknown and of his own, was manipulating information to make it appear that Taymullah Azhar had arranged for Di Massimo to kidnap his daughter. See how the money travels from Signor Azhar’s account to Di Massimo’s to Squali’s? For the earlier documents showed a Doughty–Di Massimo–Squali path, and these were documents he—Salvatore—had obtained soon into the investigation. While these most recent documents sent from London, Piero . . . ? They have been amended to alter one’s perception of guilt.

“This man Signor Doughty is involved to his armpits,” Salvatore told the magistrate. “Michelangelo Di Massimo has been telling the truth. It was a plan from London all along, engineered by this private investigator and carried out by Michelangelo and Roberto Squali.”

“And why have you not given this material to Nicodemo?” Piero asked. His voice was meditative, and Salvatore hoped this meant he was taking the information on board.

He said, “Indeed I will, Piero, but I first wanted to apologise to you. Holding Carlo Casparia as long as you have done . . . ? This built in Michelangelo a false assurance that all was well and he was safe from discovery. Had you released Carlo as I was insisting, chances are that Michelangelo would have fled the area once Roberto’s body was found. He would have known we were hours from making a connection between himself and Roberto Squali, but because you had Carlo named as principal suspect, he thought he was safe.”

Fanucci nodded. He still didn’t look entirely convinced by Salvatore’s performance, so Salvatore repeated his apology as he gathered the material from the magistrato’s desk. He said, “This I will give to Nicodemo now. So that he—and you—can put a period to the investigation.”

“The extradition of Doughty,” Piero murmured. “This will not be an easy business.”

“But you will manage it, no?” Salvatore said. “You are more than a match for the British legal system, my friend.”

“Vedremo,” Fanucci said with a shrug.

Salvatore smiled. Certo, he thought, they certainly would see. And in the meantime, Taymullah Azhar was off the magistrato’s radar. Out of sight and out of mind, which made him available in every possible way to Salvatore. Which was what he wanted.

VICTORIA

LONDON

Lynley knew he couldn’t put off a meeting with Isabelle. He was out of time. He could attempt to avoid her for a few more days of “I’m on it, guv, but there’s one more thing . . .” But as she was not a fool, she wouldn’t accept that. So he was down to outright lying to her about what Barbara was up to since the only information John Stewart had been able to provide was where she’d been and not what she’d done there, or he could tell Isabelle the truth.

He regretted knowing a single thing about what Barbara Havers had been doing. He’d given her warning, but that had amounted to nothing. She hadn’t backed away from the mad course she was travelling because she was driven by love. But while the expression “love is blind” had applications to overlooking the faults of another person, it had no application to the responsibilities held—and sworn to—by a member of the police force when it came to a crime.

Yet . . . hadn’t he wished to protect his own brother several years in the past when Peter’s proclivity for involving himself with unsavoury sorts from the underbelly of London’s drug culture had resulted in his being suspected of murder? Yes. He had wished so. No matter the evidence to the contrary, he had refused to believe that Peter was involved, and as things turned out, he wasn’t. So that could indeed be the case just now between Barbara Havers and Taymullah Azhar. Except they wouldn’t learn if Azhar was indeed innocent of all things should she suppress evidence, would they? Which was what it had come down to with Peter. Only by forcing Peter through the process of being a suspect had he been entirely cleared. It had nearly destroyed his own relationship with Peter to keep his hands off what was going on, but he had done so. And this was what Barbara needed to do.

Lynley chose not to wait like a coward for Isabelle to call him to account. When he saw her coming towards him in the corridor, he inclined his head towards her office. Did she have a moment? Yes, she did.

She closed the door. She put distance between them by means of her desk. He accepted this as a declaration of the difference in their positions. He drew a chair up, and he told her what he knew.

He didn’t spare her any of the details he’d managed to uncover about Dwayne Doughty, Bryan Smythe, Taymullah Azhar, the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Upman, the death of Angelina Upman, and Barbara Havers. Isabelle listened. She didn’t make notes and she didn’t ask questions. It was only when he got to the plane tickets to Pakistan and Barbara’s knowledge of them that she gave any reaction at all. And then, her reaction was to go pale.

She said only, “And you’re certain of the dates? The purchase date and the flight date, Tommy?” Before he could reply, she went on. “Never mind. Of course you’re certain. John Stewart wouldn’t have known about those tickets, of course. If Barbara discovered them in-house—through SO12—he’d have no reason to wonder what she was doing in talking to those blokes. She hadn’t left the building, after all. She might even just have phoned up SO12 and called in a favour from someone, mightn’t she?”

“It’s possible,” he said. “And as she was working on a case, more or less, they wouldn’t question her needing to know something from them, especially since they’d already cleared Azhar of all terrorist concerns.”

“What a bloody mess.” Isabelle sat there thoughtfully, looking not at him but not at anything else either. Her eyes seemed fixed on something in the distance. He reckoned what she was looking at was her own future. She said, “She’s met with the reporter again.”

“Corsico?”

“They met in Leicester Square. He’s in Italy now, so we can assume he’s on Barbara’s business.”

“How do you know? Not the Leicester Square part, but the rest?”

She nodded towards the closed door, towards what lay beyond it in the building. “John, of course. He’s not given up. He has her leaking information to the press, disobeying direct orders, conducting her own mini-investigation on matters occurring in another country. Where’s that place along the river, Tommy, the spot that pirates got hanged and the tide washed over them?”

“Execution Dock?” he said. “There’s probably more legend to that than reality.”

“No matter. That’s where John would like to see her. Figuratively or otherwise. He won’t stop till it happens.”

Lynley could sense the despair that the superintendent was feeling. He felt it himself but in far less measure. She’d managed to hold DI Stewart at bay by telling him she was taking on board every detail that he provided her. But if she didn’t act upon those details soon, he would go above her head to the assistant commissioner. Sir David Hillier wouldn’t look with kindness upon the facts as presented by Stewart. When he turned from those facts to assign to someone responsibility for how they were handled, that person was going to be Isabelle herself. She had to act and soon.

He said, “Where’s Barbara now?”

“She’s asked to go to Italy. I denied the request. I told her to get back to work. I’ve still not received her final report on this Dwayne Doughty person, whatever that report is going to look like. Obviously, I can’t put her back on John’s team and Philip Hale doesn’t need her at the moment. Did you not see her when you came in?”

He shook his head.

“Has she not phoned you?”

“She hasn’t,” he said.

Isabelle was thoughtful for a moment before she asked, “Has she a passport, Tommy?”

“I have no idea.”

“God. What a cock-up.” She looked at him as she reached for the phone. She punched in a number and waited for an answer. When it came she said, “Judi, I need to arrange a word with Sir David. Is he in today?” Hillier’s secretary said something on her end of the line, and in a moment Isabelle looked at the diary on her desk. “I’ll be up then,” she told the other woman. She thanked her, rang off, and stared at the phone.

Lynley said, “There’s more than one way to end this, Isabelle.”

“Don’t, for God’s sake, tell me how to do my job,” she replied.

CHALK FARM

LONDON

Who the higher-ups were that Bryan Smythe was referring to, Barbara didn’t know. But when she left his house in South Hackney and strode to her car at the end of the street, she learned. Where before she’d been too caught up in her plans, her next steps, and her machinations to be both aware and wary, now she had her eyes open for anything out of place, and she saw it easily enough.

Clive Cratty, newly minted as a detective constable and eager to prove himself to his immediate supervisor, tried to dodge out of sight behind a white Ford Transit some ten houses along the terrace on the opposite side of the street. But Barbara clocked him and she instantly knew that John Stewart had placed someone on her tail.

She was furious about this, but she had no time to deal with Stewart or his minions. He was going to do what he was going to do. She had to get herself to Italy.

Her passport was at home, she needed to throw a few things into a duffel, and she needed a ticket. For this last, she could phone and beg the mercy of an airline, or she could grab her things, head to one of the airports, and hope for the best.

Since it was still working hours, there was plenty of parking when she reached her home. Even the driveway of the big house was empty, so she made use of it and charged to the back of the old villa to her bungalow. She hustled inside, threw her shoulder bag on what went for the kitchen table, and began to tear her clean knickers from a line above the sink. She balled them up, then turned to go to the wardrobe. That was when she saw Lynley sitting in the armchair next to her daybed. She shrieked and dropped her knickers to the floor.

“Bloody goddamn hell!” she cried. “How’d you get in?”

He held up the extra key to her front door. “You need to be more creative with your emergency key,” he said. “That is, if you don’t want to come home sometime and find someone less friendly than I sitting here waiting for you.”

She gathered her thoughts and her wits along with her knickers, which she scooped from the floor. She said, “I reckoned that under the doormat was too obvious to be obvious. Who would really expect to find a key there?”

“I don’t think your everyday housebreaker goes in for reverse psychology, Barbara.”

“You obviously didn’t.” She kept her voice light as she crossed the room.

“Isabelle knows everything,” he said. “Smythe, Doughty, what you were up to, what they were up to, intimate talks between you and Mitchell Corsico. Everything, Barbara. She rang Hillier before I left her office. She made an appointment to see him. She knows about the tickets to Pakistan as well, so she’s ending this. There was nothing I could do to stop her. I’m sorry.”

Barbara opened the wardrobe. Stuffed high on a shelf was her duffel, and she pulled this out. She grabbed up clothing without much thought as to the Italian climate, the appropriateness of her choices, or anything else save the haste she needed to employ to get out of England and into Italy as soon as she could. She could feel Lynley watching her, and she waited for him to tell her she was giving in to a foolhardy madness.

But all he said was, “Don’t do this. Listen to me. Everything you’ve attempted in this business of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping and Angelina’s death has fallen apart. Smythe has admitted it all to me.”

“There was nothing for that bloke to admit.” But she didn’t feel as confident as she tried to sound.

“Barbara.” Lynley rose from the chair. He was quite a tall man, over six feet by several inches, and he seemed in that moment to fill the room.

She tried to ignore him but that was impossible. Still, she continued her chaotic packing. She went to the bathroom and grabbed up everything she thought she might need, from shampoo to deodorant and all points in between. She had no sponge bag for these goodies, so she wrapped them in a well-used hand towel and tried to get by Lynley and back into the other room where the duffel awaited her.

He was in the doorway, however. He said again, “Don’t do this. Smythe talked to me and he’ll talk to others. He’s admitted eliminating some pieces of evidence entirely and doctoring other pieces of evidence. He’s told me about the documents he’s created. He’s told me about the calls you paid upon him. He’s given up Doughty as well as the woman. He’s finished, Barbara, and his only hope is going to be emigration in advance of a lengthy and complicated police investigation that will land him in gaol for God knows how many years. That’s how it is. What you have to ask yourself is which side you’d like to be on in what’s investigated.”

Barbara pushed past him. “You don’t understand. You’ve never understood.”

“What I understand is that you want to protect Azhar. But what you must understand is that whatever Smythe has done, it can only be done in the most superficial way. Do you see that?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She shoved the toweled items into the duffel and looked round the room distractedly. He was making it impossible to think. What else did she need? Her passport, of course. That eternally unused document, which had always been intended to mark a change of direction in her life. Something new, exciting, different, edgy. Sunbathing on a Greek island beach, walking along the Great Wall of China, going nose to nose with a tortoise in the Galápagos. Who the bloody hell cared as long as it was different from the dismal life she led now?

Lynley said, “Then you need to hear the truth. To do what he does, Smythe has to know people who know people who know people. That’s how it works. Someone inside whatever institution he wants to hack into slips him a password or slips someone else a password who then slips it to him. Things get doctored but not in the Gordian knot of backup systems that the institution employs. All of this gets sorted out. Arrests are made. People then talk, and all along the truth itself is buried in a backup system that no one can crack without a court order. That backup system shows everything. And you and I both know what that everything is.”

She swung round to face him. “He didn’t do anything! You know that as well as I do. Someone wants him to take a fall. Doughty wants him to go down for a kidnapping that he himself arranged, and someone else wants him to go down for murder.”

“For God’s sake, Barbara, who?”

“I don’t know! Don’t you see that’s why I have to go over there? Maybe it’s Lorenzo Mura. Maybe it’s Castro, her earlier lover. Or her own dad, for disappointing his dreams. Or her sister, who’s hated her forever. I don’t bloody know. But what I do know is that none of us is going to turn over a stone and find the truth if we’re all sitting in London trying to do everything by the sodding book.”

She dashed to the table next to the daybed. In its only drawer she kept her passport. She pulled the drawer open and flipped its contents onto the bed. The passport was gone.

That did it for her. Something she couldn’t begin to identify broke inside of her, and she flung herself across the room upon Lynley. She shrieked, “Give it to me! Goddamn you to hell, give me my passport!” And to her horror, she began to cry. She sounded like a madwoman, she knew, but there was nothing left inside of her that could possibly explain to her longtime partner why she was doing what she was doing, so like a fishwife out of a Victorian novel, she cursed him and then she beat on his chest. He caught her arms and he shouted her name, but he wouldn’t stop her, she swore to herself. If she had to kill him to get to Italy, that was what she was going to do.

“You have a life beyond this!” she cried. “I have nothing. Do you understand? Will you understand?”

“Barbara, for the love of God—”

“Whatever you think will happen, it doesn’t matter to me. Do you get that? What matters is her. I’m not leaving Hadiyyah in the hands of the Italian authorities if something happens to Azhar. I won’t do that and I don’t care about anything else.”

She was left sobbing. He let go of her arms. He watched her and she felt the humiliation sweep through her. That he, of all people, should see her like this. Reduced in this way to the disintegrating substance of what comprised her: loneliness that he had never known, misery that he had seldom felt, a future stretching out in front of her that contained her job and nothing else. She hated him in that moment for what he’d brought her to. Her anger finally superseded her tears.

He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out her passport. He handed it to her. She snatched it from him and grabbed her duffel.

“Lock up when you leave” were her final words to him.