Just One Evil Act

16 May

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Salvatore Lo Bianco inspected his face in the bathroom mirror. The bruises were yellowing up nicely. He looked less beaten up and more like he was recovering from a bout with jaundice. In a matter of days, he would be able to see Bianca and Marco once again. This was good as his mamma was not happy about being denied the company of her favourite nipoti.

He went to his car when he left the tower. It was a brisk walk in the fine spring air, and he stopped for caffè and a pastry on his way. He ate and drank quickly. He bought a copy of Prima Voce from the news vendor in Piazza dei Cocomeri. He glanced at its headline and its cover story. So far, he saw, Piero Fanucci hadn’t let the E. coli cat out of the bag.

Relieved, he drove to Fattoria di Santa Zita, beneath an azure sky whose cloudlessness promised a day of heat on the alluvial plain where Lucca lay. Above in the hills, the trees offered great banks of shade that would keep the temperatures more pleasant, and along the dusty lane onto Lorenzo Mura’s property, the tree branches formed a pleasing, leafy tunnel. When he emerged from it, he parked near Mura’s winery. He heard voices from within the ancient stone structure. He ducked beneath the arbour’s drapery of wisteria and entered the shadowy place, where the scent of fermentation was like a fine perfume that tinctured the air.

Lorenzo Mura and a younger foreign-looking man were beyond the tasting room and inside the bottling room. They were examining a sheaf of labels, prefatory to placing them on two or three score bottles. Chianti Santa Zita, the labels announced, but Mura didn’t seem pleased with the look of them. He was frowning as he spoke. The younger man was nodding.

Salvatore cleared his throat. They looked up. Did the port wine birthmark that marred Mura’s otherwise handsome face grow darker? It looked so to Salvatore.

“’Giorno,” he said. He’d heard them talking and followed the sound of their voices, he explained. He hoped that he wasn’t interfering.

Of course, he was interfering, but Lorenzo Mura didn’t say that. Instead he spoke again to the younger man, whose pale skin and fair hair marked him as either English or, more likely, a Scandinavian who, like so many of his fellows, spoke Italian along with another two or three useful languages. The younger man—no name given and none required, Salvatore thought—listened and disappeared into the winery’s depths. For his part, Mura gestured to an open bottle near the labelling machine. Vorrebbe del vino? Hardly, Salvatore thought. It was far too early in the day for him to sip Chianti, appreciatively or otherwise. But grazie mille, all the same.

Lorenzo apparently felt no such compunction about the hour. He’d been imbibing and so had his assistant. Two glasses stood nearby, still half-filled with wine. He picked up one of them and drained it. Then he said dully, “She’s dead. Our child dies with her. You do nothing. Why do you come?”

“Signor Mura,” Salvatore said, “we would have these things move quickly but they can only move as fast as the process itself allows.”

“And this means . . . ? What?”

“This means that a case must be built. One builds it first and then moves to finish it with an arrest afterwards.”

“She dies, she’s buried, and nothing happens,” Mura said. “And from this you tell me a ‘case’ is being built. I come to you directly when she dies. I tell you this is no natural death. But you send me away. So why are you here?”

“I come to ask if you will allow Hadiyyah Upman to reside with you here at the fattoria until other arrangements can be made with her family in London.”

Mura’s head jerked. “What does this mean?”

“That I am in the midst of building a case. And when I have built it—which I must do with care—I will take the next step and I will not hesitate. But arrangements need to be made in advance and I have come to you in order to make them.”

Mura studied his face as if trying to sift for truth or lie. Who could blame him? Salvatore thought. Nine times out of ten in the country and particularly in Tuscany hadn’t it happened that an arrest was made first and then facts were pounded into shape to fit the case afterwards? This was especially the situation when a public minister like Piero Fanucci had a range of vision that was limited to a single suspect from the moment it was decided that a crime had occurred. Mura would know that, and he would wonder why no one was arresting anyone for anything in the matter of the deaths of his lover and their child.

Salvatore said to Mura, “The fact of murder has to be established in a death such as that of your Angelina. This has been made more difficult because she was ill in the weeks leading up to her death. We now know what caused her to die—”

Mura took a step towards him, reaching out. Salvatore held up a hand to stop him.

“—but this is something we are not speaking of yet.”

“He did this. I knew it.”

“Time will tell.”

“How much time?”

“This is something we cannot know. But we move forward, keeping what we learn close to our hearts. Still, that I have come to ask you about arrangements of the care of Hadiyyah . . . I would hope that this tells you how near to the end we are.”

“He came to us, he built her trust, and when he had it . . . somehow he did this. You know it.”

“We are speaking today, the professor and I. We have already spoken and we will also speak tomorrow. Nothing, Signor Mura, is being left unturned or going unnoticed. I assure you of that.” Salvatore inclined his head towards the door. He said in an altogether different tone, “You raise asini, no? This I have learned from the London detective. Will you show them to me?”

Mura’s face grew cloudy. “For what reason?”

Salvatore smiled. “For the reason of purchase. I have two children who would love such an animal to keep as a pet in the countryside where I have a small cottage. They are pets, vero?, these animals you breed? Or if they are not, they are gentle enough to become pets, no?”

“Certo,” Lorenzo Mura said.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

In the end, Salvatore had accomplished his mission. The sight of Lorenzo Mura’s donkeys in the olive orchard had prompted his request to talk to someone who had bought one of the docile-seeming creatures most recently so that he could reassure himself that they were gentle enough to be his children’s pet at the family’s nonexistent cottage in the country. Mura had given him the name of his most recent customer, and Salvatore had taken matters from there.

A call upon the man had eliminated him as a possible source of the E. coli that had killed Angelina Upman. Not because there would have been no bacteria on his farmland near Valpromaro but because he confirmed during their conversation that he had indeed recently purchased a foal from Signor Mura and that he had paid in cash so as to allow Signor Mura to avoid one of the myriad ways in which Italians were taxed. He gave the date of his purchase of the animal, which coincided perfectly with the presence of the man that Ispettore Lynley had reported passing an envelope of something to Mura at the fattoria.

When he returned to the questura, it was to gather more information from Ottavia Schwartz and Giorgio Simione, still slogging their way through the congregation of scientists who’d met in Berlin in April. They’d located a scientist from the University of Glasgow who studied E. coli, Ottavia reported. It was likely that there would be others if the ispettore wished them to continue.

He did, he told her. He wasn’t about to go Fanucci’s route. He wanted to know it all, inside and out, before he made his next move. To Salvatore, indagato meant more than just naming a suspect. Indagato meant that the investigators were certain they had their man.

PISA

TUSCANY

In the end, it turned out that flying into Pisa was the easiest. Barbara could have flown into one of the regional airports, utilising one of the many budget airlines that appeared to pop up every month or so, but she wanted the peace of mind that came with a brand-name airline unlikely to lose her limited baggage and an airport labelled with the word international.

When she landed in Italy, she was assaulted by the foreign experience. People shouted at one another incomprehensibly, signs made announcements in a language she couldn’t read, and—once she worked her way through customs and baggage claim—scores of tour guides awaited their charges, while jostling crowds appeared to be bargaining with illegal taxi drivers offering quick trips to the Leaning Tower.

Luckily, she didn’t need to do anything other than look for her ride to Lucca, and he was as easy to spot as an albino chimpanzee at the zoo. Despite being in Italy—the veritable home of la moda—Mitchell Corsico was garbed as usual. He’d eschewed the fringed jacket—probably because of the heat—but the rest of him was vintage Wild West. For her part, Barbara had set aside slogan-bearing tee-shirts in favour of tank tops, anticipating exactly what she found the moment they stepped from the arrivals hall: blistering heat.

Mitch was on his mobile when Barbara glimpsed him among the hordes. He continued on his mobile as he led her to his hire car. Barbara caught only snatches of his conversation as she hauled her duffel along behind him. It was mostly along the lines of “Yeah . . . Yeah . . . The interview’s coming . . . Hey, it’s in the diary, Rod. What more can I say?” When he ended the call, he said, “Lard arse,” in apparent reference to his editor. At that point, they’d reached the side of a Lancia, and Barbara was sweating profusely.

She squinted in the bright sunlight and muttered, “What’s the sodding temperature in this place?”

Mitchell gave her a look. “Get a grip, Barb. It’s not even summer.”

Their route to Lucca consisted of a terrifying drive on the autostrada, where speed limits appeared to be mere suggestions that the Italian drivers chose to ignore. Corsico seemed to be in his element. Any faster, Barbara reckoned, and they’d be airborne.

As he drove, he informed her that the first story had run in The Source that morning, in case she hadn’t had time to pick up a copy at the airport. He’d moulded it, he said, along lines that would generate a dozen follow-up stories. He hoped she appreciated that, by the way.

“What’s that mean, exactly?” Barbara asked him. “What sort of follow-up stories’re we talking about? How’d you write the first one?”

He glanced at her. Someone passed them in a blur of silver. He increased the Lancia’s speed and wove round a lorry. Barbara increased her grip on the side of her seat. He said, “The usual format, Barb. ‘This E. coli situation is either a cover-up by the Italians to avoid tanking their economy while the source is being searched out among all the products they sell, or it’s a deliberate poisoning by a suspect unnamed . . . with an upcoming charge of murder in sight. Stay tuned.’”

“As long as you keep away from Azhar.”

He looked at her, his expression disbelieving. “I’m on a story. If he’s part of it, he’s part of it, and I’m putting him into it. Let’s get something straight, you and me, now we’re working hand in hand: You don’t climb into bed with a journalist and expect him not to want to feed the beast.”

“You’re mixing your metaphors,” she informed him. “I’d think that’s a very bad thing for a writer. Or am I stretching things to actually call you a writer? And who said we’re working hand in hand?”

“We’re on the same side.”

“Doesn’t sound like that to me.”

“We both want to get to the truth. And anyway, like I said, Azhar’s name’s already come up.”

“I made it bloody well clear—”

“You can’t be thinking Rod Aronson would let me hang round Lucca on the strength of some pregnant Englishwoman keeling over in Tuscany. The UK reader needs a hell of a bigger hook than that.”

“And what? Azhar’s become the hook? Goddamn it, Mitchell—”

“He’s part of the story, like it or not, darling. For all I know, he probably is the story. Bloody hell, Barb, you should be glad I’m not going after the kid.”

She grabbed his arm, digging her fingers into it. “You stay away from Hadiyyah.”

He shook her off. “Quit interfering with the driver. We get in a crash and we’re the next story. And anyway, all I’ve done so far is go the route of ‘By the way, our good professor of microbiology is assisting the police with their enquiries, and we all know what that means, don’t we? Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.’ Rod wants an interview with the bloke. You’re going to be my route to that.”

“I’ve given you what you’re getting from me,” she told him. “Azhar’s not on the table. I’ve told you that from the very first.”

“Look. I thought you wanted me here to get to the truth.”

“So get to the truth,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Azhar.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

The outskirts of Lucca made it seem like any other overdeveloped place in any other country in the world. Aside from the fact that the street signs and advertisements were in Italian, everything else was fairly standard. The streets held apartment buildings, inexpensive hotels, tourist restaurants, takeaway food shops, assorted boutiques, and pizzerias. There was a great deal of traffic and congestion. Women with pushchairs took up too much room on the pavements, and adolescents who should have been in school were instead hanging about engaged in the three activities common to adolescents nearly everywhere: texting, smoking, and chatting away on mobile phones. Their hairstyles were different—far more elaborate and excessively gelled—but other than that they were the same. It was only when the centre of the town was reached that Lucca suddenly became unique.

Barbara had never seen anything like its wall, encircling the oldest part of the town like a medieval rampart. She’d been to York, but this was different, from the enormous grassed-in ditch that lay before it and could at one time have done duty as a moat, to the roadway atop it. Mitch Corsico drove them round it on a shady boulevard whose purpose seemed to be to show the wall to its best advantage. Half of the way round, however, he made a quarter circle in a huge piazza and turned into a short length of roadway that took them beneath and through one of the wall’s huge gates.

Here, there was another piazza. Here, they vied with tourist buses debouching elderly people in Bermuda shorts, sun hats, sandals, and black socks. Near a shop hiring bicycles, they found a parking bay. Mitch climbed out of the car with “It’s this way,” and he left her to wrestle with her duffel once more.

She thought she’d packed light, but as she struggled to keep up with him, Barbara gave serious thought to dumping everything in the nearest wheelie bin. There was no wheelie bin in sight, though, so she was left heaving and dragging the thing as Mitchell led her out of the piazza, past a church—“First of hundreds, believe me”—and into a throng of people who appeared to comprise tourists, students, housewives, and nuns. Lots of nuns.

Thankfully, she wasn’t in Mitch’s wake for long on this narrow thoroughfare. Ahead of her, she saw him make a turn into another street, and when she finally got there, it was to find him leaning against the wall of a car’s-width tunnel. This tunnel, she saw, led into yet another large piazza upon which a merciless sun was blazing.

She thought he was taking a rest in the shade or perhaps even waiting to offer her help. Instead, when she reached him with her heart pounding and sweat dribbling into her eyes, he said, “Don’t travel much, eh? Basic rule, Barb. One change of clothes.”

He ducked through the tunnel, then, and into the piazza. It was circular, she saw, and Mitch told her it was the town’s ancient amphitheatre. Shops, cafés, and habitations formed its perimeter. In the bright light of the day, Barbara wanted to head for the nearest shade to buy something very cold and very wet. In fact, that was what she thought they’d come to do until the journalist pointed to a mass of cacti and succulents displayed in neat ranks in front of a building and told her that was Azhar’s pensione.

“Time to pay up with the interview,” he said. And when she was about to protest, he played the best card last and with considerable skill: “I’m making the rules, Barb, and maybe you need to think about that. I c’n just leave you here to sort out who speaks English and can help you out. Or you c’n be a bit more cooperative. Before you make up your mind on that one, though, I’d like to point out that the coppers here don’t speak our lingo. On the other hand, loads of the journalists do and I’m happy to give you an introduction to one or two of them. But ’f you ask for that, you owe me. Azhar is how you’re going to pay.”

Barbara said, “No deal. I reckon I can make myself clear to anyone I want to talk to.”

Mitch smiled. He nodded towards the pensione in question. “If that’s how you want to hang the laundry,” he said.

That should have told her, of course. But Barbara wasn’t ready for Mitchell Corsico to be dictating the terms of their working relationship in Italy. So she marched across the piazza with her duffel weighing down her shoulder, and she rang the bell outside of Pensione Giardino. Its windows were shuttered against the heat, as were all of the windows in the piazza save one at which a housewife was hanging pink bedsheets on a line that extended across the front of her apartment. Every place else looked deserted, and Barbara was at the point of concluding this same thing about the pensione when its front door opened and a dark-haired pregnant woman with a winsome-looking child on her hip gazed out at Barbara.

At first, all seemed well. She noted Barbara’s duffel, smiled, and beckoned her inside. She led her into a dimly lit—and, praise God, cooler—corridor, where, on a narrow table, a candle flickered at the feet of a statue of the Virgin and a door opened into what looked like a breakfast room. She gestured that Barbara was meant to place her duffel on the tiled floor, and from a drawer in the table, she brought out a card that looked like something one was meant to fill out in order to stay in the pensione. Fine and dandy, Barbara thought, taking the card and the offered Biro. Sod you, Mitchell. There wasn’t going to be a problem at all.

She filled the card out and handed it over, and when the woman said, “E il Suo passaporto, signora?” Barbara handed it over as well. She was a little concerned when the woman walked off with it, but she didn’t take it far—just to a buffet inside the breakfast room—and when she rattled off a few sentences in an incomprehensible lingo that Barbara reckoned was Italian, it seemed as if what she was saying was something along the lines of needing the passport for a bit of time in order to do something with it, which Barbara could only hope was not sell it on the black market.

The woman then said, “Mi segua, signora,” with a smile, and hoisted her child higher on her hip. She headed towards a stairway and began to climb, and Barbara reckoned she was meant to follow. This was all well and good, but there were questions she needed to ask before she got herself established in this place. So she said, “Hang on just a minute, okay?” and when the woman turned to her with a quizzical expression, she went on with, “Taymullah Azhar is still here, right? With his daughter? Little girl about this tall with long dark hair? First thing I need to do—well, aside from having a wash—is to speak to Azhar about Hadiyyah. That’s the little girl’s name. But you probably know that, right?”

What these remarks did was unleash in the woman a veritable flood. She came back down the stairs firing on all linguistic cylinders. None of them, however, were distinguishable to Barbara.

Immediately morphing into the metaphorical deer illuminated by an oncoming car’s headlights, Barbara stared at the woman. All she could pick out from the inundation of language was non, non, non. From this, she worked out that neither Azhar nor Hadiyyah was in the pensione. Whether they were permanently gone she couldn’t tell.

Whatever her recitation meant, the woman was agitated enough to prompt Barbara to dig her mobile phone from her bag and hold it up, if only to silence her. She punched in Azhar’s number but got no joy from that once again. Wherever he was, he still wasn’t answering.

The woman said, “Mi segua, mi segua, signora. Vuole una camera, sì?” She pointed up the stairs, from which Barbara took it that camera meant room in Italian and not an instrument of photography. She nodded and heaved her duffel off the floor. She trudged behind her hostess up two flights of stairs.

The room was clean and simple. Not an en suite, but what would one expect in a pensione? She got herself established in shorter order than she had previously intended—a cool shower would obviously have to wait—and she scrolled through her mobile’s address book to find the phone number of Aldo Greco.

Luckily, his secretary’s English was as good as Greco’s. The solicitor wasn’t in his office at present, Barbara was told, but if she left her number . . .

Barbara explained. She was trying to locate Taymullah Azhar, she said. She was a friend from London now here in Lucca, and she had come because for the past two days she’d been unable to reach Azhar by phone. She was dead concerned about him and, more to the point, about Hadiyyah, his daughter, and—

“Ah,” the secretary said. “Let me have Signor Greco phone you at once.”

Barbara wasn’t sure what at once meant when it came to Italy, so after she gave her number and rang off, she began to pace the room. She opened the shutters on the windows, then the windows themselves. Across the piazza, she saw Mitch Corsico seated at a café table beneath an umbrella, enjoying a drink of some kind. He seemed perfectly relaxed and perfectly content. He knew something, she reckoned, and he was waiting for her to learn it for herself.

This she did in short order. Her mobile rang and she snatched it up, barking into it. It was Greco.

Taymullah Azhar had been arrested, he told her, for the crime of murder. He’d been at the questura for the past two days, in and out and off and on, with the arrest coming at half past nine this morning.

God in heaven, Barbara thought. “Where’s Hadiyyah?” she demanded. “What’s happened to Hadiyyah?”

In answer, Aldo Greco said that he would meet her at his office in forty-five minutes.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

She had no choice. She had to take Corsico. He knew his way round Lucca, and even if she set off without him, he would only follow her. So when she left Pensione Giardino, she crossed the piazza to him, sat, picked up his glass, and drained it. The drink was something very sweet poured over two cubes of ice. Limoncello and soda, he said. “Go easy with that, Barb.”

Advice given too late. It hit her directly between the eyes. Her vision felt impaired by a sudden haze. She said, “Bloody hell. No wonder the vita is so dolce in this country. That’s what they do for elevenses?”

“’Course not,” he said. “They’re easier about life, but they’re not insane. I take it you got the word about Azhar?”

She felt her eyes narrow. “You knew?”

He lifted his shoulders in mock regret.

“Goddamn it, I thought we were working together.”

“So did I,” he said. “But then . . . when it came down to it . . . on the matter of interviews . . .”

“Christ. All right. So where’s Hadiyyah, then? Do you know that as well?”

He shook his head. “But it’s not like there’re dozens of possibilities. They’ve got rules to follow, and I expect none of them say nine-year-olds are left on their own to book themselves into the Ritz when their daddies get charged with murder. We need to find her, though. The sooner the better as I’ve a deadline to meet.”

Barbara flinched at the callous nature of the remark. Hadiyyah was nothing to Corsico, just another angle to the story he planned to write. She got to her feet, experienced a moment of dizziness from the drink, and waited for it to pass. She scored a handful of crisps from a basket on the table and said, “We’re heading to Via San Giorgio. Know where that is?”

He threw some coins into the otherwise empty ashtray and got to his feet. “Not far,” he told her. “This is Lucca.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Aldo Greco turned out to be a courtly-looking man along the lines of his fellow Lucchese Giacomo Puccini but without the moustache. He had the same soulful eyes and the same thick dark hair touched at the temples with silver strands. His olive skin bore not a single crease. He could have been anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. He looked like a film star.

Barbara could tell he thought that she and Mitch Corsico were a very odd match, but he was too polite to make any comment aside from Piacere—whatever the hell that meant—when she introduced herself and her companion to the solicitor.

Greco asked them to sit and offered them refreshments. Barbara demurred. Mitch said a coffee wouldn’t go down half bad. Greco nodded and asked his secretary to see to this, which she did efficiently. Mitchell was presented with a thimble of liquid so black it might have been used motor oil. He was apparently familiar with this, Barbara thought, because he put a sugar cube between his teeth and tossed the mess back.

Greco was guarded with them once they’d covered the bases of general courtesy. He had no real idea who Barbara was, after all. She could have been anyone—to whit, she could have been a journalist—claiming to know Azhar. Azhar had not mentioned her to the solicitor, and this presented a problem for Greco, who was bound by ethics and probably otherwise loath to give out even the most superficial detail associated with his client’s arrest.

She showed him her police ID. This impressed him only marginally. She mentioned DI Lynley, who’d preceded her to town as liaison officer in the matter of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping, but this achieved a solemn nod and nothing else. She finally remembered that tucked inside her purse was a school photo of Hadiyyah that the little girl had given to her at the start of Michaelmas term back in London. On the back of it she’d written Barbara’s name, Friends 4ever, her own name, and a line of x’s and o’s. Barbara said, “When I heard that Azhar was in and out of the questura, I knew I had to come because Hadiyyah has no relatives in Italy. And her mum’s family in England . . . Well, Angelina was estranged from them. What I was thinking is that if anything more happened . . . I mean, she’s been through hell, hasn’t she?”

Greco examined the photo Barbara had handed him. He didn’t look convinced till she hit upon her mobile phone. Upon it, she found an old message from Azhar, thankfully undeleted. She handed the mobile over to the solicitor, who listened and finally seemed convinced enough of her friendship with the man to give her the barest of details.

She would understand, would she not?, that his client had not authorised him to speak to her and therefore certain limits had to apply to what he said. Yes, yes, Barbara told him, and she prayed that Corsico had the good sense not to pull a reporter’s notebook from the pocket of his trousers and start scribbling in it.

First, Greco told her, Hadiyyah had been returned to Fattoria di Santa Zita, the home of Lorenzo Mura, where she had been living with her mother prior to her mother’s death. This was not a permanent arrangement, naturally. Her relatives in London had been notified by Mura of the child’s father’s arrest. Were they on their way to fetch her? Barbara asked. If that was the case, she told herself, time was of the essence, for if the Upmans got their hands on Hadiyyah, they would make sure, purely out of spite, that Azhar never saw her again.

“This I do not know,” Greco said. “The police made the arrangements to deliver her to Signor Mura. I did not.”

“Azhar wouldn’t have given the coppers the name of any Upman to fetch Hadiyyah,” Barbara told the solicitor. “He would have given them my name.”

Greco looked thoughtful as he nodded. “This could be the case, certo,” he said. “But the police would want a blood relative of the little girl to come for her, as there is no evidence that the professor is actually her father. You see the difficulty in fulfilling whatever desires he might have in the matter, no?”

What Barbara saw was that she needed to know where Fattoria di Santa Zita was. She glanced at Mitchell. He had his reporter’s face on: perfectly blank. She knew this meant he was committing everything to memory. There might be a benefit to having him on her team.

She said, “What’s the evidence against him? There has to be evidence. I mean, if someone’s come up with the charge of murder, they have to list the evidence, don’t they?”

“In due course,” Greco said. He steepled his fingers in front of his chest and used them a bit as a pointer as he explained to her how the justice system worked in Italy. Thus far, Taymullah Azhar was indagato, his name entered into the judicial records as a suspect. He’d been served with the paperwork that indicated this—“We call this avviso di garanzia,” Greco said—and the details of the charges had yet to be revealed. They would be in time, certo, but for the moment an order of segreto investigativo prevented their revelation. At this point, only carefully placed leaks in the newspapers were providing information.

Barbara listened to this and at the end of it said, “But you must know something, Mr. Greco.”

“As of now, I know only that there is concern about a conference that the professor attended in April. There is also concern about his profession. At this conference were microbiologists from around the world—”

“I know about the conference.”

“Then you will see how it looks that Professore Azhar attended. And then, shortly thereafter his child’s mother died from an organism that could have been obtained—”

“No one can think Azhar traipsed round Europe with a petri dish of E. coli hidden in his armpit.”

“Please?” Greco looked confused.

“The armpit bit,” Mitchell Corsico murmured.

Barbara said, “Sorry. What I mean is that the entire scenario—how this was supposed to play out?—it’s stupid. Not to mention so unlikely that . . . Look. I need to get in to talk to this copper. Lo Bianco. That’s who it is, right? You c’n arrange for me to see him, can’t you? I work with DI Lynley in London, and Lo Bianco will know his name. He doesn’t need to know I’m a family friend. Just tell him I work with Lynley.”

“I can make a phone call,” Greco told her. “But he speaks virtually no English.”

“No problem,” Barbara said. “You c’n go with me, can’t you?”

“Sì, sì,” he said. “I could do this. But you must consider that Ispettore Lo Bianco is not likely to speak to you frankly if I am present. And I assume you wish him to speak frankly, no?”

“Right. Of course. But, bloody hell, doesn’t he have to tell you—”

“Things are different here, signora—” He stopped and corrected himself with “Scusi. Sergeant. Things are different here when an investigation is ongoing.”

“But when there’s an arrest . . .”

“It is much the same.”

“Bloody hell, Mr. Greco, this is circumstantial evidence. Azhar went to a conference, and someone died a month later of a microorganism that he himself doesn’t even study.”

“Someone who had taken his child from him died. Someone who had hidden that child’s whereabouts for many months. This, as you know, does not look good.”

And it would look worse, Barbara reckoned, if Azhar’s part in Hadiyyah’s kidnapping became known. She said, “You can’t convict someone on circumstantial evidence.”

Greco looked astonished. “On the contrary, Sergeant. Here, people are convicted for much less every day.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

It was without surprise that Salvatore Lo Bianco received the news that another representative from New Scotland Yard had appeared in Lucca. He had expected someone from London to show up once he’d arrested Taymullah Azhar. The word would have gone out to the British embassy via Aldo Greco, and the information would have filtered inevitably from the British embassy to the Metropolitan police. This was doubly the case because, once the arrest had been made, an English child was left without an English carer. Someone had to deal with that as she was no relation of Lorenzo Mura’s and Mura was merely sheltering her until other arrangements could be made. So to have a police presence from England on hand did not surprise him. He merely hadn’t expected that person to appear at the questura so quickly.

It wasn’t DI Lynley, which was unfortunate. Not only had Salvatore liked the Englishman, it had also been convenient that Lynley spoke quite decent Italian. Indeed, he found it decidedly odd that the Metropolitan police would send someone to Lucca who didn’t speak Italian. But when Aldo Greco rang him and gave him her name and her details—including her lack of Italian—he agreed to see her. Greco assured him that the officer would bring a translator with her. Her companion—an English cowboy, Greco said—apparently had several contacts in the town, and one of them would see to it that Sergeant Havers was accompanied by a native speaker.

Salvatore hadn’t thought much about what an English woman detective might look like, so he wasn’t prepared for the woman who came into his office some two hours after the phone call from Greco. When he saw her, he reflected on the fact that, perhaps, he’d been too influenced over the years by British television dramas dubbed into Italian. He’d anticipated, perhaps, someone along the lines of one distinguished and titled actress or another, a little hard round the edges but otherwise leggy, fashionably put together, and attractive. What walked into his office, however, was the antithesis of all this, save for the hard-round-the-edges part. She was short, stout, and garbed in desperately wrinkled beige linen trousers, red trainers, and a partially untucked navy-blue tank top that hung from her plump shoulders. Her hair looked as if she’d put herself into the hands of her gardener who’d done double duty while trimming the hedges outside of her house. Her skin was beautiful—the British were served well by their damp climate, he thought—but it was shiny with perspiration.

Accompanied by a bookish-looking woman with very large spectacles and very gelled hair, the English detective strode across the office to his desk with so much confidence and so much un-Italian disregard for her personal appearance that, grudgingly, he had to admire her. She held out a hand, which he discovered was damp. “DS Barbara Havers,” she said. “You don’t speak English. Right. Well. This is Marcella Lapaglia, and I’ll be square with you: Marcella’s the partner of a bloke called Andrea Roselli. He’s a journalist from Pisa, but she’s not going to give him any information unless you say it’s fine by you. She’s here to translate, and I’m paying her for it, and luckily she needs the money more than she needs Andrea’s approval at the moment.”

Salvatore listened to this stream of babble and caught a word here and there. Marcella did a rapid translation. Salvatore didn’t like it one bit that this other woman was the lover of Andrea Roselli, and when he said this directly, Marcella told the English detective. They went back and forth a bit until he said, “Come? Come?” impatiently and Marcella paused to translate for him.

“She’s a professional translator” were the English detective’s words via Marcella. “She knows how fast her career goes down the toilet if she spreads information she’s not meant to spread.”

“This had better be the case,” Salvatore said directly to Marcella.

“Certamente,” she told him evenly.

“I work with DI Lynley in London,” DS Barbara Havers told him. “So I’m fairly well in the loop of what’s been happening over here. Mostly I’m here to deal with the kid—the professor’s daughter—and it’ll help me do that if I know exactly what you’ve got on Azhar and how likely it is that he’ll go to trial at some point. She’s going to have questions—Hadiyyah, the kid—and I’ll need to work out what to tell her. You c’n help me with that. What d’you have on Azhar—the professor—if you don’t mind my asking? I mean, I know he’s going down for murder—Mr. Greco told me—and I know about his job back in London and the conference in Berlin he attended and what Hadiyyah’s mother died of, as well. But . . . well, let’s be honest, Inspector Lo Bianco, far as I know at the moment unless you’ve got more than you’re saying, what you’ve got on him seems iffy at best, hardly the stuff on which arrests are made and charges drawn. So it seems to me, with your approval, I c’n tell Hadiyyah her dad’s going to be home soon enough. That is, like I say, unless there’s something here I don’t know about yet.”

Salvatore heard the translation of all this, but he kept his gaze fixed on the detective sergeant, who kept her gaze fixed on him as well. Most people, he thought, would drop their eyes at some point or at least shift them to take in the details of his office, such as they were. All she did was finger the dirty shoelace on her red trainer, whose encased foot she held casually on one of her knees. When Marcella had reported all of the sergeant’s words, Salvatore said carefully, “The investigation is still ongoing. And, as you must know, Sergeant, things are done differently here in Italy.”

“What I know is you’ve got less than circumstantial evidence. You’ve got a string of coincidences that make me wonder why Professor Azhar’s behind bars at all. But let’s not go there for the moment. I’m going to want to see him. You’ll need to arrange that.”

The order made Salvatore prickly. Really, she was rather incredible, making such a request, considering she was in Italy for the purpose of seeing to the welfare of Hadiyyah Upman. “For what reason do you ask to see him?” he enquired.

“Because he’s Hadiyyah Upman’s father, and Hadiyyah’s going to want to know where he is, how he is, and what’s going on. That’s only natural, as I expect you know.”

“His fatherhood is something unproven,” Salvatore pointed out. He was glad to see that his comment made her bristle once she heard Marcella’s translation of it.

“Right. Yes. Well. Whatever. You score a point on that one, don’t you. But a blood test will sort everything out soon enough. Look, for his part, he’s going to want to know where she is and what’s happening to her, and I want to be able to tell him that. Now you and I know that you c’n arrange it. I’d like you to do so.” She waited while Marcella translated. He was about to reply when she added, “You c’n think of it all as a merciful concession. Because . . . well, let me be frank. You do look like a merciful sort of bloke.” Before he could reply to this astonishing remark, she looked round and said, “D’you smoke, by the way, Inspector? Because I could do with a fag but I don’t want to offend.”

Salvatore emptied the ashtray he kept on his desk and handed it to her. She said, “Ta,” and began to dig round in a massive shoulder bag she’d set on the floor. She muttered and damned this and bloody helled that—these words he knew—and finally he reached in his jacket for his own cigarettes and handed them to her. “Ecco,” he said. To which she replied, “See? I said you looked like a merciful bloke.” And then she smiled. He was taken aback. She was, as an object of femininity, quite appalling, but she had an extraordinarily lovely smile and, unlike what he’d come to think of as the English predilection for doing nothing to improve the state of their dentition, she also seemed to care about her teeth, which were very straight, very white, and very nice. Before he knew what he was doing, he smiled back. She handed the cigarettes back to him, he took one, offered one to Marcella, and they all lit up.

She said, “C’n I be honest with you, Chief Inspector Lo Bianco?”

“Salvatore,” he said. And when she looked surprised, he said in English, “Not so long,” and he smiled.

“Barbara, then,” she replied. “It’s shorter as well.” She inhaled in a masculine fashion and seemed to let the smoke settle into her blood before she said, “So c’n I be honest, Salvatore?” And when he nodded at Marcella’s translation, “From what I c’n tell, you’re building a case against Taymullah Azhar. But c’n you put E. coli into his hands?”

“The conference in Berlin—”

“I know about Berlin. So he was at a conference? What difference does it make?”

“None at all till you look into the conference and discover that he was on a panel along with a scientist from Heidelberg. Friedrich von Lohmann, he’s called, this man. There, at the university in Heidelberg, he studies E. coli in a laboratory.”

Barbara Havers nodded, her eyes narrowing behind the smoke from her cigarette. “All right,” she said. “The panel bit? I didn’t know that. But ’f you ask me, it’s just coincidence. You lot can’t go into court with that, can you?”

“Someone has gone to Germany to interview this man,” Salvatore told her. “And you and I know that it would not be impossible at a conference of this kind for one scientist to ask another for a strain of bacteria to look at for some reason.”

“Like asking to see his vacation snaps?” she asked with a laugh.

“No,” he said. “But it would not be difficult for him to create a reason that he needed this bacteria, would it: the project of a graduate student whose work he is supervising, his own shift in interest perhaps. These are merely two examples he could have used with the Heidelberg man.”

“But bloody hell, Inspector . . . I mean, Salvatore, you can’t think these blokes carry samples round with them! What d’you have? Azhar giving Mr. Heidelberg—What was his name again?”

“Von Lohmann.”

“Right. Okay. So d’you see Azhar giving von Lohmann the word in Berlin and von Lohmann fishing the E. coli out of his suitcase?”

Salvatore felt himself growing hot. She was either deliberately misunderstanding his words, or Marcella was not translating them correctly. He said, “Of course I do not mean Professor von Lohmann had the E. coli with him. But the seed of Professor Azhar’s interest was planted at that conference and once Hadiyyah was kidnapped by means of the London detective, then further plans were laid.”

Marcella’s translation arrested the sergeant’s cigarette on its way to her mouth. She said, “What’re you saying, exactly?”

He said, “I’m saying that what I have in my possession is proof from London that the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Upman was engineered there, not here. This detective in London who sends me the information? He would like me to think that a man called Michelangelo Di Massimo developed the scheme in Pisa, with the solitary assistance of Taymullah Azhar.”

“Hang on right there. There’s no bloody way—”

“But I have documents here that prove otherwise. Many records that—compared to the earlier records which I also have—have been altered. My point is this. Things are not simple and I am not stupid. Professor Azhar has been charged with murder. But I suspect this is not all he will be charged with.”

The sergeant twirled her cigarette, using her thumb and her index and middle fingers in a way that suggested she’d smoked for decades. She held her cigarette like a man, as well. Salvatore wondered vaguely if she was a lesbian. Then he wondered if he was stereotyping lesbians. Then he wondered why he was wondering anything at all about the curious detective.

She said, “Want to share what’s taking your head in that direction? It’s a bloody strange one, you ask me.”

Salvatore was careful with what he told her. He had banking information that contradicted earlier banking information, he explained. This information made things look as if someone somewhere was fixing evidence.

She said, “Sounds like nothing’s traceable to Professor Azhar, far as I can tell.”

“It’s true that a forensic computer specialist will have to sort through it all to follow the trails. But this can be done, and it will be, eventually.”

“‘Eventually’?” She thought about this, drawing her heavy eyebrows together. “Ah. You’re not on that case any longer, are you? Someone gave me that info.”

He waited while Marcella struggled with info. When she had it straightened out in her mind and the translation came, he said, “Murder is, I think you will agree, a more pressing issue to be dealt with now that the child is safe and several arrests have been made for her kidnapping. Everything will happen in due time. It is how we do things in Italy.”

She crushed out her cigarette. She did this vigorously, however, and some of the ashes spilled onto her trousers. She tried to rub them off, which made things worse. She said, “Bloody hell” and “Oh well,” which she followed with, “As to seeing Azhar. I’d like a few words with him. You c’n arrange that, right?”

He nodded. He would do that for her, he decided, as it was only right that the professor see the police liaison from his own country. But he had a feeling that this Sergeant Havers knew more about Taymullah Azhar than she was telling him. He reckoned Lynley would be able to help him out with the questions he had about this strange woman.

VICTORIA

LONDON

The truth of the matter was that Lynley not only didn’t know if anything could save Barbara Havers, but he also didn’t know if he wanted to go to the effort even to forestall what was looking more and more like the inevitable conclusion to this business.

He told himself initially that the maddening woman didn’t really belong in police work anyway. She couldn’t cope with authority. She had a chip on her shoulder the size of a military tank. She had appalling personal habits. She was often dazzlingly unprofessional and not only in her manner of dress. She had a good mind, but half the time she didn’t use it. And half of the half when she did use her mind, it led her completely astray. As it had done now.

And yet. When she was on, she was on and she gave the job her life’s blood. She was fearless when it came to challenging an opinion with which she didn’t agree, and she never put the possibility of promotion ahead of her commitment to a case. She might argue and she might bite into a theory that she believed in like a pit bull with its jaws locked on a piece of meat. But her ability to confront the sorts of people she shouldn’t begin to be able to confront set her apart from every other officer he’d worked with. She didn’t pull a forelock in anyone’s presence. That was the sort of officer one wanted on one’s team.

And then, there was the not small matter of her having saved his life. That act of hers would always hang between them. She never brought it up and he knew she never would. But he also knew he would never forget it.

So he ended up deciding that he had no real choice. He had to give it a go and try to save the bloody woman from herself. The only way he saw to do this was to prove she was right about everything regarding Angelina Upman’s death.

It would be tough going, and he brought Winston Nkata in on the process. Nkata would check into everyone associated with Angelina Upman in London: their whereabouts during the time of her illness and death in Tuscany as well as their associates in London and the unlikely possibility of their getting their hands on E. coli. He was to start with Esteban Castro—Angelina’s erstwhile lover—and he was to include the man’s wife, along with Angelina’s own relatives: Bathsheba Ward and her parents and Hugo Ward as well. No matter what name he came up with, Lynley told him, he was to follow that name and to look for connections. In the meantime, he himself would head to Azhar’s lab at University College in order to double-check St. James’s work.

Winston looked doubtful about the entire procedure, but he said he would get on it. “But you don’ think any of this lot’s involved, do you?” he asked. “Seems to me the E. coli bit’s asking for a specialist.”

“Or someone who knows a specialist,” Lynley told him. He sighed and added, “God knows, Winston. We’re flying in the dark by our trouser seats.”

Nkata smiled. “You sound like Barb.”

“God forbid,” Lynley said. He went on his way. He was in the car heading to Bloomsbury when Salvatore Lo Bianco rang him from Lucca. The inspector’s opening remark of “Who is this extraordinary woman that Scotland Yard has sent over, Ispettore?” did nothing to assure him that Barbara was at least behaving herself in Italy. There was a small mercy in the fact that Lo Bianco did not wait for an immediate answer. Instead he gave Lynley the information he needed to fashion a response that didn’t condemn Barbara at once.

“She is odd for a liaison officer,” Salvatore told him, “as she speaks no Italian. Why did they not send you again?”

Lynley went with the liaison officer part. Unfortunately, he’d not been available this time round, he explained. He wasn’t, in fact, in the loop as to what Sergeant Havers was doing in Tuscany. Could Salvatore bring him into the picture?

Thus he learned that Havers was presenting herself as having been sent to Italy to deal with Hadiyyah Upman’s situation. Thus he also learned that Taymullah Azhar not only was indagato but also was being held in prison while under investigation for murder. Things were moving rapidly.

Salvatore told him about the conflict between the information he’d received from London and his own information. On the one hand, he said, he was in possession of an early set of Michelangelo Di Massimo’s bank records, and on the other hand, London had sent him masses of data that, upon examination and comparison to Michelangelo’s bank records a second, later time, showed that someone had doctored the Pisan’s account.

“They’ve got someone over here hacking into accounts and creating documents,” Lynley told him. “Everything is suspect at this point, Salvatore. Your best course is to have a computer expert at your end work out how they’re diddling with things. We could, naturally, try for a court order here to get the banks and the phone companies to delve into their backup systems in order to get our hands on the original records. But that will take time, and it’s iffy anyway.”

“Why, my friend?”

“An Italian crime would be the reason for our request for a court order. Frankly, that would be difficult to get a judge to move on. I think it might be easier to break one of the principals over here. I’ve spoken to one of them—a bloke called Bryan Smythe. I can speak to the other, Doughty, if you’d like.”

He would welcome that, Salvatore told him. Now as to this unusual officer from the Met . . . ?

“She’s a good cop,” Lynley said truthfully.

“She wishes access to the professor.” Lo Bianco explained Havers’s reasoning behind her request.

“It makes sense,” Lynley said, “unless it’s your wish to increase the pressure on Azhar by keeping him in the dark about his daughter: where she is, how she is, and what she’s doing.”

Lo Bianco was silent for a moment. He finally said, “It would be useful, sì. But while a confession based on pressure would be acceptable in some quarters—”

“To il Pubblico Ministero, you mean,” Lynley said.

“It is how he operates, vero. And while he would accept a confession that grew from a man’s desperation, I feel . . . somewhat reluctant. I cannot say why.”

Probably because of Havers, Lynley thought. She had a way of skittering between bullying people and manoeuvring people that he occasionally admired. He said nothing but made understanding noises at his end.

Lo Bianco said, “There is something . . . When she spoke to me, there is a feeling I had.”

“What sort of feeling?”

“She comes as a liaison officer to see to the welfare of the child, but she asks many questions and offers opinions about the case against Taymullah Azhar.”

“Ah,” Lynley said. “That’s standard procedure for Barbara Havers, Salvatore. There isn’t a topic on earth that she wouldn’t have an opinion about.”

“I see. This helps me, my friend. Because her questions and her comments were suggesting to me more than merely professional interest.”

Dangerous ground, Lynley thought. He said untruthfully, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Nor am I, exactly. But there is an intensity about her . . . She wanted to argue certain points relating to the professor’s arrest. Coincidences, she called them. Circumstantial evidence at best, she said. Now, it is not that her declarations have influenced me, my friend. But I find the intensity of her interest unusual in someone who is here in Italy only to see to the care of a child.”

This was the juncture at which, Lynley knew, he ought to be telling Salvatore Lo Bianco about Barbara’s relationship with Azhar and his daughter, not to mention about the unauthorised nature of her jaunt to Italy. But he understood that, if he did so, the Italian would prevent her access to the Pakistani man. It was likely that he also would deny her any contact with Hadiyyah. That seemed unfair, especially to a child who was no doubt feeling both frightened and abandoned. So he told Lo Bianco that Barbara’s intensity of interest in the case he was building probably had to do with her inquisitive nature. He’d worked with Barbara many times, he reported to the Italian. Her habit of arguing, playing devil’s advocate, seeking other routes, looking at matters from all directions . . . ? This was merely who she was as an officer of the Met.

In a shift of topic, he quickly went on to tell Salvatore that he would pay a call upon Dwayne Doughty. “Perhaps I can sew up one part of the kidnapping investigation, at least,” he said.

“Piero Fanucci will not like anything that detracts from how he sees that case,” Salvatore told him.

“Why do I expect that will give you a lot of pleasure?” Lynley asked.

Salvatore laughed. They rang off. Lynley continued on his way to Bloomsbury.

At Taymullah Azhar’s laboratory, he showed his identification to a white-coated research technician who introduced himself with the bicultural name of Bhaskar Goldbloom, clearly the offspring of a Hindi mother and a Jewish father. The technician had been seated at a computer when Lynley entered the lab, one of eight people who were at present working in the complex of rooms. None of the researchers had been informed about the arrest in Italy of their laboratory’s leading professor, Lynley found. He brought Goldbloom slowly into the picture by means of introducing the reason for his unexpected call at the lab.

He would like, he told the research technician, to be shown everything in the lab. He would need the identification and the stated purpose of every item. He would need to know and to see all the strains of bacteria both in storage and undergoing experimentation.

Bhaskar Goldbloom didn’t embrace the idea of a detailed tour. Instead, he pointed out pleasantly that, as far as he knew, Detective Inspector Lynley would need a search warrant for that sort of thing.

Lynley was prepared for this response. It was, after all, reasonable and wise. He pointed out to Goldbloom that he could indeed go through channels in order to obtain the appropriate warrant, but his assumption had been that no member of Azhar’s lab would really want a team of policemen to come inside and mess things about. “Which,” he added, “I’d like to assure you they’d have no compunction at all about doing.”

Goldbloom thought this one over. He said, at the end of his thinking, that he would need to phone Professor Azhar to obtain his permission. And this was the point at which Lynley informed Goldbloom and, through him, everyone else of Azhar’s perilous situation in Italy: under arrest for a murder by means of a bacteria and currently unavailable by phone.

This changed the complexion of things at once. Goldbloom said he would cooperate with Lynley. He added, “How many hours do you have, Inspector?” in a sardonic tone. “Because this is going to take a while.”

SOLLICCIANO

TUSCANY

When the phone call came through from Chief Inspector Lo Bianco, Barbara Havers and Mitchell Corsico were cooling their heels at a pavement table outside of a café in Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi where, at the moment, an outdoor market was offering a dazzling variety of foodstuffs from several dozen colourful stalls. They were imbibing the national beverage of Italy, a viscous liquid that was dubbed coffee—or at least caffè—but which only three cubes of sugar and a dousing with milk made remotely drinkable. Mitch had insisted that Barbara at least try the stuff. “If you’re going to be in Italy, for God’s sake, you c’n at least get behind the culture, Barb” was the way he had put it. She’d groused but cooperated. Once she’d had a shot of the mixture, she reckoned she’d be awake for the next eight days.

When her mobile rang, giving her the news that Lo Bianco had arranged things so that she could see Azhar, she gave Mitchell Corsico the thumbs-up. He said, “Yes!” but he was less than pleased when she told him that she alone had been given access to the prisoner. Mitchell called foul, and she couldn’t blame him. He needed a story for The Source, he needed it fast, and Azhar was the story.

She said to him, “Mitchell, Azhar’s yours the moment we spring him. The exclusive interview, the picture, Hadiyyah sitting on his lap and looking winsome, the whole plate of ravioli. It’s yours, but it can’t happen till we get him out of there.”

“Look, you got me over here with a tale of—”

“Everything I’ve told you has been true, yes? You don’t see anyone coming after your neck for spreading lies, do you? So have some patience. We get him out of prison, and he’s going to be grateful. Grateful, he’s going to give you an interview.”

Corsico didn’t like the set-up, but he could hardly complain. Barbara’s position as a police officer had got her inside to see Lo Bianco in the first place. He knew this and had to live with it. Just as she had to live with whatever he came up with as story material at the end of the day.

Azhar was being held at a prison, the customary lodging place for someone who’d been charged with murder. It was miles from Lucca, which necessitated another terrifying race on the autostrada, but they made good time and Lo Bianco had phoned ahead with instructions. It was not visiting hours. It was not a visiting day. But the police had access when they wanted access. In very short order once they arrived at the place, Barbara was ushered into a private interview room which, she suspected, was not generally used when family members came calling upon the incarcerated. She’d left behind her bag and everything in it in Reception. She was searched and wanded. She was thoroughly questioned and summarily photographed.

Now in the centre of the room, she sat at its only table. This was fastened to the floor, as were its accompanying chairs. There was a large and grisly-looking crucifix fitted onto the wall, and Barbara wondered if this constituted a means of eavesdropping on what went on in the room. Microphones and cameras were so tiny now that one of the nails in Jesus’s feet and one of the thorns in his crown could easily contain them.

She rolled her thumbs along the pads of her fingers and wished for a cigarette. A sign on the wall opposite the dying Jesus seemed to forbid smoking, however. She couldn’t read the Italian but the large circle containing a cigarette with a red slash through it was universal.

After a minute or two, she got to her feet and began to pace. She gnawed on her thumbnail and wondered what was taking so long. When the door finally opened after a quarter of an hour, she half expected someone to come in and tell her the gaff was blown and her presence in Italy had not been confirmed—let alone sanctioned—by the London police. But when she swung round to face the door, it was Azhar who entered ahead of a guard.

In an instant Barbara realised two facts about her neighbour from London. First, she had never seen him unshaven, which he now was. Second, she had never seen him when he was not garbed in a crisp white dress shirt. Sleeves neatly rolled up in summer, sleeves rolled down and cuffs buttoned in winter, sometimes with a necktie, sometimes with a jacket, sometimes with a pullover, accompanying jeans or trousers . . . It was always the dress shirt, as definite to him as the way he signed his name.

Now, though, he wore prison garb. It was a boiler suit. It was a hideous shade of green. In combination with his unshaven face, with the dark patches of skin beneath his eyes, with his hollow expression of defeat, the sight of him made Barbara’s eyes prickle.

He was, she could tell, horrified to see her. He stopped just inside the door, so quickly that the guard accompanying him stumbled and then barked, “Avanti, avanti,” which Barbara took to mean Azhar was to get his arse inside. When he’d cleared the doorway, the guard stepped within and closed the door. Barbara gave a silent curse when she saw this, but she understood. She was not his solicitor, so she could claim no privilege.

Azhar spoke first. He did not sit. “You should not have come, Barbara,” he said futilely.

She said, “Sit,” and gestured to a chair. She told him the lie she had prepared. “This isn’t about you. I’ve been sent by the Met because of Hadiyyah.”

That, at least, prompted him to do as she said. He dropped into a chair and clasped his hands on the table. They were slender hands, lovely hands for a man. She’d always thought so, but now what she thought was that those hands would not serve him well in prison.

She said to him quietly, very nearly in a whisper, “And how could I not have come, Azhar, once I heard about this?” She gestured to the room, to the prison.

He matched the barely audible tone she employed. “You have done too much already to try to help me. There is no help for what has happened now.”

“Oh, really? Why’s that? Did you actually do what they think you’ve done? Did you manage to get Angelina to down a dose of E. coli? What did you put it in, her morning oatmeal?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Then, believe me, there’s help. But it’s time for you to start being straight with me. From A to Z. A’s the kidnapping, so let’s start there. I need to know everything.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

She shook her head bleakly. “That’s where you go wrong every time. You went wrong in December and you’ve gone wrong ever since. Why can’t you see that if you’re still lying about the kidnapping—”

“What do you mean? There’s nothing that I—”

“You wrote her a card, Azhar. Something for her kidnapper to hand to her so she would know for certain you were behind the snatching. You had him call her khushi and then give her a card, and in that card you told her to go with the man because he would bring her to you. Does this sound familiar?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She hissed, “Now, when in hell’re you going to stop lying to me? And how in hell d’you expect me to help you if you won’t start telling me the truth? About everything. DI Lynley gave me a copy of that card, by the way. And you can wager everything you’ve ever owned that the Lucca coppers are having the handwriting verified by an expert even as we speak. What the bloody hell were you thinking? Why did you take that risk?”

His reply was nearly inaudible. “I had to make sure she went with him. I told him to call her khushi, but how could I know that would be enough? I was desperate, Barbara. Can you not understand that? I had not seen my child in five months. What if she hadn’t gone with someone who merely called her khushi? What if instead she had told Angelina that a stranger had approached her in the market, trying to lure her beyond the walls? Angelina would have made it impossible for anyone to get near her after that. Hadiyyah would have been lost to me forever.”

“Well, that’s been taken care of, hasn’t it?”

He looked at her in horror. “I did not—”

“Do you see how it looks? How everything looks? You hire a detective to find her, then you kidnap her, then you come over here playing at Concerned Dad, and you’ve got tickets to Pakistan. Hadiyyah gets found, hugs and kisses all round, and in very short order Angelina dies. And what she dies of is a microorganism and you’re a bloody microbiologist. Are you following me? This is how a case is built, Azhar. And if you don’t start being straight with me about what you know and what you’ve done and how you’ve done it, then I can’t help you and, more important, I can’t help Hadiyyah. Full stop.”

“I did not,” he murmured brokenly.

“Yeah? Well, someone bloody did,” she whispered fiercely. “Lo Bianco’s onto a bloke passing you a petri dish of E. coli when you were in Berlin. Or posting it to you afterwards. Someone called von Lohmann, from Heidelberg. Meantime, The Source has dug up a woman from Glasgow who studies E. coli and who was also at this bloody conference. You were on a panel with the Heidelberg bloke, and for all I know you played hide-the-salami with the Glasgow woman when the sun went down, all the better to get her ready to hand over a vial of bacteria when you needed it.”

He flinched. He said nothing. His eyes were pained.

She sighed and said, “Sorry. Sorry. But you have to see how things look and how they’re going to look when all the pieces get put together. So if there’s anything—and I mean anything at all—that you haven’t told me, now’s the time.”

At least he didn’t respond at once. This, Barbara thought, was a good sign because it meant he was thinking instead of just reacting. She needed that from him. Thinking and remembering both. And, she knew, he would pass along the information she’d given him so that his solicitor might have the information as to how Lo Bianco was building his case. So all wasn’t lost, and she needed very much to keep things that way.

He said, “There is nothing more. You know it all now.”

“Have you any message for Hadiyyah, then? She’s where I intend to head next.”

He shook his head. He said, “She must not know,” and he lifted his fingers in a tired gesture that spoke of his whereabouts and his state of mind.

“Then I won’t tell her,” Barbara said. “Let’s hope Mura has the same intention.”

FATTORIA DI SANTA ZITA

TUSCANY

Mitchell Corsico had a map to assist with the location of Fattoria di Santa Zita. He even knew who Santa Zita was. During his downtime in Lucca—which, as he put it, there had been a hell of a lot of—he’d seen the highlights of the town, and Santa Zita’s corpse was one of them, encased in a glass coffin in the church of San Frediano, up on an altar, kitted out in her maid’s clothes, he reported. Just the stuff to enhance every kid’s nightmares. God only knew why Lorenzo Mura’s property was named after her.

Barbara had already decided that she couldn’t take Corsico with her to Lorenzo Mura’s home. She hadn’t the first clue what was going to happen when she showed her mug at his place, and she didn’t want a journalist there to exploit what went down. She thought at first that leaving Mitchell behind would be a problem, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. From their excursion to the prison, he had to devise a story to send to his editor and he had limited time in which to do it. He’d remain in Lucca while she went to the fattoria, he told her, but he would expect a report from her, and it had better be a full one.

Right, Barbara told him. Whatever you say, Mitch.

On their way back from the prison, she cooperatively fed the journalist what details she could from her visit with Azhar, going heavy on the atmosphere of the place, on Azhar’s physical and emotional condition, and on the jeopardy that he faced with regard to the investigation. She went light on everything else, and the kidnapping she didn’t bring up at all.

No fool, Corsico didn’t take to her limited facts like a baby swallowing a spoonful of honey with the medicine. He jotted down notes, he demanded to know what the circumstances of the circumstantial evidence were, he asked good questions that she did her best to dodge, and at the end he reminded her of their relative positions. If she double-crossed him, she would be sorry, he told her.

“Mitchell, we’re in this together,” she reminded him.

“Don’t forget that” was his parting shot.

Azhar had told Barbara where Fattoria di Santa Zita was, and once she and Mitchell located the place on his map, she set off in his hire car after leaving him on the pavement along Via Borgo Giannotti outside of the city wall. She watched him duck into a café. When he was out of sight, she proceeded up the street, heading for the River Serchio and out of the town.

Fattoria di Santa Zita, she found, was high in the hills and up an unnerving road of hairpin turns and precipitous drops. The countryside here combined forest with agricultural land, and the agricultural land was heavily given to vineyards and olive groves. The fattoria was marked with an easily noticeable sign. The reason for this sign she discovered once she made the left turn and headed into the place: She nearly hit a yellow convertible MG on her route, a classic vehicle swervingly operated by a young man whose passenger was intent upon nibbling his neck. Brakes were applied all round, and the driver of the MG yelled out, “Whoops! Sorry about that! Hey, have the oh-seven Sangiovese. We bought a case of it. You can’t go wrong. Jesus, Caroline, get your hand out of there!” And with bursts of laughter from him and his companion, he managed to manoeuvre the MG past Barbara’s car and hence to the road.

From all this, Barbara reckoned that wine tasting went on at Fattoria di Santa Zita, and she discovered soon enough that she was not wrong. Perhaps a quarter of a mile along the unpaved lane, she came to the driveway into the fattoria. Not much farther and she saw an ancient barn with a heavy arbour of wisteria draping lavender flowers towards a scattering of rustic tables and chairs.

The doors to the barn were open, and Barbara parked close by in the space designated for tasters. She crossed the gravel and then the flagstone terrace where the tables stood. It was dim in the barn, so when she went inside, she paused for her eyes to adjust to the change in light.

She expected to see Lorenzo Mura, but she did not. What she saw was a roughly hewn bar set up with wineglasses, a display of the wines ostensibly made on the property, a basket of savoury biscuits, and four wedges of cheese contained beneath a glass dome on a cutting board. The air was so fragrant with the scent of wine that she reckoned she could get tipsy just by breathing deeply. She did so and her mouth watered in anticipation. A glass of wine wouldn’t have gone down half bad, and she wouldn’t have minded a few pieces of cheese either.

A young man emerged from a cavernous room beyond the tasting area, where Barbara could see three stainless steel vats and row upon row of empty green bottles. He said, “Buongiorno. Vorrebbe assaggiare del vino?” and she stared at him uncomprehendingly. Apparently, he read this for what it was because he switched to English, which he spoke with what sounded like a Dutch accent. He said, “English? Would you like to try some Chianti?”

Barbara showed her police identification. She was there to speak to Lorenzo Mura, she said.

“Up at the villa” was his reply. He waved towards the interior of the barn, as if the villa could be accessed from there. He went on to explain how to get to the place. Drive or walk, he told her, it wasn’t far. Follow the road, curve past the old farmhouse, go through the gates, and then you’ll see it. “He might be on the roof,” he told her.

“You work for him, I s’pose?” Barbara said. He looked to be somewhere in his twenties, probably a European student having a spring-through-summer work/study/play in Italy. He said that he did, and when she asked if there were more of his ilk about the property, he said no. He was the only one working on the farm at present, aside from the blokes who were working on the farmhouse and the villa.

“Been here long, then?” she asked.

He’d arrived only the week before, he told her. She scratched him from her list of potential suspects.

She went by foot the rest of the way to the villa. She noted the size of the operation that Lorenzo Mura had going at the fattoria. Not only did vineyards fall down a hillside overlooking a rather stupendous view of mountain villages, more vineyards in the distance, and other farms, but olive groves promised a source of income from oil, and cattle grazing near a stream far below suggested beef products as well.

An old farmhouse was under renovation, and so, it seemed, was the villa when she finally came to it. It sat at the top of a sloping lawn, and scaffolding covered the sides of it. On the roof swarmed half a dozen men. They were in the process of removing its tiles, which they were tossing to the ground three floors below them. This was a noisy business, accompanied by enormous clouds of dust as well as a great deal of shouting in Italian. Over the shouting music played at a volume sufficient for most of Tuscany to hear quite easily. It was old rock ’n’ roll sung in English: Chuck Berry was asking Maybellene why she couldn’t be true.

One of the workers clocked her approach, for which she was grateful since she didn’t think she’d be capable of outshouting Chuck. This man waved and disappeared from view for a moment. Into his place stepped Lorenzo Mura.

He stood, backlit by the afternoon sun, arms akimbo, as Barbara approached the villa. She wondered if he would recognise her from their meeting in London the previous month. Apparently he did because he descended the rickety scaffolding quickly and, in her opinion, with insufficient care. By the time she reached the area in front of the building’s great loggia, he was coming round the side of the place and his expression didn’t indicate that the red carpet was about to be unrolled.

He spoke first, saying, “Why are you here?”

She took a moment before she replied. He looked about as bad as Azhar, she thought. Sleepless nights, too much daytime labour, insufficient food, forcing himself to move forward through every day, grief . . . These would take the stuffing out of any man. But so would a bout with E. coli, she thought. He looked shaky, and his colour was pasty. The port wine stain on his face appeared deeply purple.

She said to him, “Have you been ill, Mr. Mura?”

“My woman and our child are in a cimitero five days,” he said. “How you think me to look?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what’s happened, I’m sorry.”

“There is no sorry for this,” he replied. “What want you here?”

“I’ve come for Hadiyyah,” she told him. “It’s her father’s wish that—”

He swiped the air with a chopping motion of his hand that stopped her words. He said, “Do not. There are things we not know. One of them is Hadiyyah’s father. Angelina said Azhar but me she tells it can be another.” And taking a moment to register the expression on Barbara’s face at this bit of news, he added, “You did not know. It is among many things you do not know. Taymullah Azhar was not the . . .” He looked for the word. He settled on “the solo man when he and Angelina first become lovers.”

“I know Angelina slept round like a ten-quid tart, but I expect that’s not exactly where you’d like this conversation to head. Past actions tend to indicate future actions, if you know what I mean, Mr. Mura.”

Colour swept his face.

Barbara said, “So that knife cuts in both directions, doesn’t it? You hooked yourself up with a woman with a colourful past, and for all we know till the day she died she had a colourful present as well. Now, I expect you’d like Azhar to doubt Hadiyyah is his, and I expect Angelina would’ve liked that also, all the better to keep her from him. But you and I both know what a DNA test can prove and, believe me, I c’n arrange for one as fast as you can ring up your solicitor and try to stop me. Are we clear on this?”

“He wants Hadiyyah, he comes for her himself. When he’s able to come, certo. Meantime—”

“In the meantime, you have a British subject in your digs, and I’m here to collect her.”

“I telephone her grandparents to come for her.”

“And her grandparents are going to do what? Cooperate with that idea? Fly over, scoop her up in their arms, and take her home to a bedroom they’ve just redecorated in her honour? That’s not bloody likely. Believe me, Lorenzo, they’d never even seen Hadiyyah before Angelina died, if they saw her then. Did they come to the funeral? Yes? It was probably to dance on Angelina’s grave, that’s how much of a nothing she was to them once she got herself involved with Azhar. They’d’ve seen her death as her finally receiving what she deserved for getting herself pregnant by a Pakistani Muslim in the first place. I’d like to see Hadiyyah now.”

Mura’s face had darkened to nearly the colour of his port wine birthmark during Barbara’s speech. But he seemed unwilling to argue further. After all, he had work to do on the crumbling villa, and his hanging on to Hadiyyah was only intended to thrust the sword deeper into Azhar’s chest, as was handing her over to her grandparents.

Barbara said to Mura, “So . . . are you and I finished here, Mr. Mura?”

Mura’s expression indicated that he would have liked to spit on her shoes, but instead he turned and headed into the villa. He didn’t go up one of the curving stairways to the loggia, though. Instead, he ducked beneath a mass of honeysuckle that arched over a weathered door at ground level. Barbara followed him.

She was surprised at the condition of the place, considering Angelina Upman had lived within it. The villa was decrepit, a relic from the distant past, and when she saw its wreck of a kitchen—so dimly lit that its higher calling clearly was to be turned into a dungeon—she reflected on how Angelina’s first move upon returning to Azhar the previous year had been to redecorate his flat to her own standards. She’d not bothered with that here. Nor, it seemed, had she bothered to clean the place. Dust, grime, cobwebs, and mould appeared to define it.

Barbara followed Lorenzo Mura through several rooms, all of which seemed part of the kitchen. Eventually, they climbed a stone stairway and emerged into some kind of huge reception room with enormous glass doors opened onto the loggia. This room was, like the kitchen below, dimly lit. Unlike the kitchen, it was relatively grime free. Its walls and ceiling were heavily frescoed, but these decorations were hard to make out after their exposure to several hundred years of candle smoke.

In this room, Lorenzo called Hadiyyah’s name. Barbara yelled, “Hey, kiddo, look who’s come calling!” In reply, footsteps clattered along some kind of corridor up above them. They came storming in Barbara’s direction, and a small body hurtled into the room and, more important, into Barbara’s arms.

Hadiyyah said the best thing possible. “Where’s my dad?” she cried. “Barbara, I want my dad!”

Barbara cast Lorenzo Mura a look that said, So he’s not her father, eh?, but she spoke to Hadiyyah. “And your dad wants you. He’s not here just now, and he’s not in Lucca, but he’s sent me for you. Want to come along, or are you happier staying with Lorenzo? He tells me your granddad and grandma’re coming to fetch you. You c’n wait for them, if that’s what you’d like to do.”

“I want to be with Dad,” she said. “I want to go home. I want to go with you.”

“Right. Well. We can make that happen. Your dad’s got a few things he’s sorting out, but you c’n stay with me till he’s finished up. Let’s get you packed. Want me to help you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Help me. Do.” She tugged at Barbara’s hand. She dragged her in the direction from which she’d come.

Barbara followed her, but not without a glance at Mura. He was watching them steadily, his face expressionless. Before she and Hadiyyah were out of the room, he’d turned on his heel and left them to it.

Upstairs, Barbara saw that at least Hadiyyah’s bedroom had been made pleasant and modern. It even had a small colour television, and on this television Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar were speaking into the camera together. There was a voice-over in Italian, but Barbara recognised the location of the filming: They sat under the wisteria arbour in front of the winery in the company of the ugliest man Barbara had ever seen, his face covered with warts as if a witch had cursed him.

“Mummy” was Hadiyyah’s explanation of what she was watching. She said it softly, a single word that exposed the pain and confusion in which the little girl doubtless found herself. She crossed the room to the television and fiddled with the player beneath it. From this she brought out a DVD. She said, “I like to watch Mummy,” in a very small voice. “She’s talking about me. She and Dad are talking. Lorenzo gave it to me. I like to watch Mummy and Dad together.”

The wish of every child whose parents are at odds, Barbara thought.

BOW

LONDON

It was quite late in the day, but Lynley took a chance that Doughty would still be at his place of employment. His time in Azhar’s lab had uncovered a detail that might prove crucial to Salvatore’s investigation into Angelina Upman’s death, and his hope was that a bit of chivvying the detective would go some distance to garner his cooperation in the matter of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping. For Doughty faced considerable jeopardy. He’d had Bryan Smythe lay trails in all directions to stymie the Italian police, but some earlier trails led directly back to his own door. Fighting extradition to Italy to face charges of kidnapping—among other charges—was going to prove costly for Mr. Doughty. Lynley was betting that Doughty didn’t want to go through that.

A teenage girl was in Doughty’s office when Lynley got there. She turned out to be the detective’s niece, having a work experience day for an assignment from her comprehensive. She could have chosen to spend a workday with one of her parents, she revealed to Lynley, but her mum was a San sister and her dad was an estate agent and a day with either of them was destined to be b-o-r-i-n-g. That was before she knew that a day with Uncle Dwayne would be even worse. She thought he carried a gun and engaged in shoot-outs and fist-fights with villains in assorted alleys replete with wooden crates and wheelie bins. Turned out he occupied his time sitting outside a William Hill betting shop where some excessively stupid husband of an even more excessively stupid and jealous wife was spending hours and days making useless wagers instead of having an affair, which was what his wife thought and which, mind you, would’ve been a lot more interesting.

“Ah” was Lynley’s response to all this. “And is Mr. Doughty about?”

“Next door,” she said obscurely. “With Em.”

Em, Lynley thought. This was a name that had not yet come up. He nodded thanks to the girl, who returned—with a mighty sigh—to the typing she’d been doing. He went next door.

Doughty was in conversation with an attractive, male-dressed woman. It didn’t appear intense as Doughty was casually leaning against the sill of a window overlooking the Roman Road and Em was facing him in a desk chair, one mannishly clad foot on a computer table. She swung in her chair when Doughty said, “Who are you?” to Lynley.

Lynley showed his identification and introduced himself. He noted the lack of recognition in Doughty’s expression. He also noted Em’s guarded look. From this he reckoned Bryan Smythe had not revealed to either of them that he had had a recent visit from New Scotland Yard. This could make things easier, Lynley thought.

He began with the purpose of his late-afternoon call. He was, he told him, there to talk to the private investigator about his interactions with a woman called Barbara Havers.

Doughty replied with “My cases are confidential, Inspector.”

“Until the CPS becomes involved,” Lynley noted.

“What, exactly, are you talking about?”

“An internal police investigation,” Lynley told him, “into the activities of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. I’m assuming that you knew she was a Met officer when you met her, but perhaps you didn’t. In any case, you can cooperate with me now or wait for the court order for your records. I’d suggest cooperation as it’s less messy that way, but it’s up to you.”

Doughty remained without expression. Em—who turned out to be called in full Emily Cass—glanced at her fingernails and brushed her right hand over her left as if unnecessarily ridding it of dust. Was the name familiar to either of them? Lynley enquired politely when they said nothing. He repeated it: Barbara Havers.

Doughty, he discovered, was a fairly quick thinker. He said to Em Cass, “Barbara Havers. Emily, could she be the woman who came to see us last winter? She was only here twice, but if you could check . . .”

To which Em Cass said to him cautiously, “Are you sure about the name? D’you have a time period? C’n you refresh . . . ?”—also a wise response.

He said, “Two people came to see us about a little girl whose mum had disappeared with her. A Muslim man and a rather dishevelled woman. I think the woman might have been called Something Havers. This would have been late in the year. November? December? You should have it in our files.” He nodded at her computer.

She played along, and after a moment perusing her computer’s monitor, she said, “I’ve got it here. You’re right, Dwayne . . . Taymullah Azhar was his name. A woman called Barbara Havers came with him.” She mispronounced Azhar’s name. Nice touch, Lynley thought.

Doughty corrected the pronunciation and carried on with the performance. “They did come about his daughter, as I recall. It was her mum who’d snatched her, yes?”

More reading of the monitor and Lynley allowed this. It was rather fascinating to see how they were going to play the situation, so he let them have as much rope as they wanted. After a moment, she said, “Yes. We traced them to Italy—to Pisa, as it happens—but that was as far as we went. This was last December. It says here that you advised the man—Mr. Azhar—to find an Italian detective who could assist. Or an English detective who spoke Italian. Whichever worked for them.”

“She’d gone into Pisa airport, hadn’t she? The mum?”

“That’s what it says.”

He looked intensely thoughtful for a moment while Lynley waited patiently for more, saying nothing but also giving no sign that he intended to leave them any time soon. Doughty said, “But did we . . . Em, luv, did we find a detective to recommend to them? Seems to me that we may have done.”

She did some scrolling, did some squinting at the screen, did some glancing in Doughty’s direction for a bit of unspoken direction from him, and did some nodding. “Mass, it says here. Is that the name, Dwayne? An abbreviation perhaps?”

“I’d have to check.” And to Lynley, “If you wouldn’t mind coming with me . . . ? I’ve got more records in my own office.”

“Let’s all go, shall we?” Lynley said affably.

A glance was exchanged between the other two. Doughty said, “Yes, why not?” and led the way.

His niece was packing up for her departure, a procedure that appeared to involve a magnifying mirror and a massive amount of cosmetics. Doughty made much of bidding her a fond farewell: hugs, kisses, and “best to Mum, darling,” and once she left them, he smiled and said, “Kids,” to no one’s agreement or reply.

He then said to Lynley, “I’ve got hard copies of some of my cases, so I might have something . . . One plans to write one’s memoirs at some point . . . Memorable cases and the like, if you know what I mean.”

“Certainly,” Lynley said. “It worked quite well for Dr. Watson, didn’t it?”

Doughty did not look amused. He opened a filing drawer and riffled through it. He said, “Here. I think we’re in luck,” and he brought out a slim manila folder.

He flipped from one page to another of the documents within. He pulled on his lower lip and frowned. He said, “Fairly interesting.”

“Indeed?” Lynley queried.

“Something apparently got the wind up for me. Couldn’t tell you now what it was, but I did a little looking into the woman—”

“Barbara Havers, you mean?” Lynley clarified.

“Turns out that, over time, some money passed from the Pakistani man to her and from her to Italy, to one Michelangelo Di Massimo.”

“I think that was the name, Dwayne,” Em Cass said. “That’s the Italian detective.”

Doughty glanced up from his paperwork, saying to Lynley, “It appears that a series of payments flowed from Azhar to Havers to this Di Massimo, so my guess is that she and the Pakistani employed him for quite some time.”

“Extraordinary that you should know that, Mr. Doughty,” Lynley pointed out.

“I’m merely deducing because of the payments.”

“Actually, I’m not talking about Di Massimo’s employment. I’m talking about the payments themselves, money moving from Azhar to Barbara Havers to Di Massimo. Extraordinary work on your part, in the true sense of the word. May I ask how you uncovered this information?”

Doughty waved the question aside. “Sorry. Trade secret. Perhaps of larger interest to Scotland Yard might be the fact that payments were made at all. What I can tell you about these two individuals—and this Barbara Havers in particular since she appears to be at the centre of your interest—is that they came to see me in the winter. I gave them what small help I could, I suggested they find an Italian detective, and the rest . . . Well, it is what it is.”

“And you saw these two people—Taymullah Azhar and Barbara Havers—how many times?”

He looked at Em Cass. “Was it twice, Em? Once when they came for help in locating the child and once when I had the facts to present to them. Yes?”

“As far as I know, that was it,” she confirmed.

“So you wouldn’t know, it seems,” Lynley said, “that Barbara Havers has for quite some time been followed by another detective from the Met.”

Silence on their part. Clearly, they hadn’t considered this possibility. Lynley waited, a pleasant expression on his face. They said nothing. This being the case, he removed from the breast pocket of his jacket his reading glasses and from an interior pocket, he took out a set of documents that he’d folded and placed there. He unfolded them and began to read John Stewart’s report aloud to the private investigator and his cohort. John had been thorough, in keeping with his compulsive nature and with his animosity towards Barbara Havers. So he had dates, and he had times, and he had places. Lynley read them all.

When he was finished, he glanced up at Doughty and Em Cass, over the top of his glasses. He said, “It tends to come down to trust in the end, Mr. Doughty. Trust always trumps money on the wrong side of the law.”

Doughty said, “All right. Agreed. She came to see me more than once evidently. Which, obviously, is why I decided to look into her.”

“Indeed. But I’m not talking about your trusting Barbara Havers. I’m talking about anyone trusting Di Massimo. Had he not subcontracted Hadiyyah’s kidnapping out to a bloke called Roberto Squali, had Squali not been photographed by a tourist, had he not driven an expensive convertible far too quickly up a mountain road, had he and Di Massimo not been in contact by mobile phone . . . Indeed, had the investigation in Italy not been handled by Salvatore Lo Bianco, who appears to be a shinier coin in the collection plate than the magistrate who heads the case, everything might have gone along the way you intended it to go. But those phone calls piqued Lo Bianco’s interest, and he followed the trail of them rather more quickly than you—at this end—apparently anticipated. So what he ended up with is a set of records far different from those you later provided him. And, Barbara Havers aside for the moment, that’s quite an interesting development in the kidnapping investigation.”

Silence. Lynley let it go on. Outside, down in the Roman Road, two men argued loudly in a foreign tongue. A dog barked and a dustbin’s lid clanged against the receptacle. But in the office, there was nothing.

Lynley said, “What I’m assuming is that, in the manner of similar shady characters, all of you have been double- and triple-crossing each other. One person gets a leg up on the other, then that person raises the ante and so on. Now, I’m not going to involve myself in any further questioning at the moment, as the hour is late and I’d like to get home, as I expect you would as well. But before you go, I’d like you to reflect on your neck, Ms. Cass’s neck, and the neck of your colleague Mr. Smythe. While you’re doing this reflecting, I’d like you to consider that Inspector Lo Bianco will be employing a forensic technology expert to follow all the diddling you’ve been doing with everyone’s records, and the Metropolitan police will be doing the same thing. Computers, as I expect you know, leave trails of cookie crumbs along the paths they take. To the average soul—like me, for example—these trails are impossible to find. To the expert in modern computer technology, this sort of work is a piece of cake. Or cookie, if you will.”

He gave Doughty time to look at the material Lo Bianco had sent him. Doughty did so and, as the man could read, he was fully capable of interpreting the message on the wall.