Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “I have not entirely removed Lorenzo Mura from my thoughts,” Salvatore admitted. “Perhaps it is time for us—you and I—to speak with Carlo Casparia. Piero has had him ‘imagine’ how this crime was committed. Perhaps he can ‘imagine’ more about that day in the mercato when the child disappeared.”

  He told the Englishman that he would come for him at the inner city gate where they had met before. At the moment, he was at the cimitero comunale, he explained, paying monthly respects to his papà’s grave. “In an hour, Ispettore?” he said to Lynley.

  “Aspetterò,” Lynley told him. He would meet Salvatore at the gate.

  And so he was waiting. Salvatore fetched Lynley at Porta di Borgo, where the detective was reading Prima Voce again. Carlo Casparia was all over the front page another time. His family had been located in Padova. Much was being made of their estrangement from their only son. This would keep Prima Voce busy for at least two days, printing stories of Carlo’s fall from favour. Meantime, Salvatore thought, the police could get work done without concern that the tabloid might get too close to what they were doing.

  He stopped briefly at the questura to fetch the laptop upon which were loaded all of the photographs taken by the American tourist and her daughter who had been in the mercato when the child disappeared. Then he and Lynley took themselves to the prison in which the hapless young man was being held. For once a confession was obtained from a suspect or once he was formally charged with a crime, he was whisked to prison, where he remained unless the Tribunal of Reexamination determined he could be released pending trial. Since Carlo’s release depended upon having a suitable place to go—and clearly the abandoned stables in the Parco Fluviale would not qualify—his home would be the prison cell in which he currently languished. All of this Salvatore explained to Lynley as they drove to see the young man. When they arrived at the prison, however, it was to learn that Carlo was in the hospital ward. As it turned out, he wasn’t taking well to the sudden absence of drugs from his system. He was taking the cure in the worst possible way, and no particular sympathy was being extended in his direction.

  Thus Salvatore and Lynley found the young man in a cheerless place of narrow beds. There the patients either were restrained by one ankle to the iron footboards or were too ill to care about attempting to effect an escape by overcoming the male nurses and single doctor who were on duty.

  Carlo Casparia was of this latter group, a figure huddled into the foetal position beneath a white sheet topped with a thin blue blanket. He was shivering and staring sightlessly at nothing. His lips were raw, his face was unshaven, and his ginger hair had been shorn from his head. A rank smell came from him.

  “Non so, Ispettore,” Lynley murmured uncertainly.

  Salvatore agreed. He, too, didn’t know what possible good this was going to do or even if Carlo would be able to hear them and respond. But it was an avenue, and it needed to be explored.

  “Ciao, Carlo.” He drew a straight-backed steel chair over to the bed as Lynley fetched another. Salvatore eased a hospital tray over and set up his laptop on it. “Ti voglio far vedere alcune foto, amico,” he said. “Gli dai uno sguardo?”

  In bed, Carlo was wordless. If he heard what Salvatore had said about the photos, he gave no indication. His eyes were fixed on something beyond Salvatore’s shoulder and, when Salvatore turned, he saw it was a clock on the wall. The poor fool was watching time pass, it seemed, counting the moments till the worst of his suffering ended.

  Salvatore exchanged a glance with Lynley. The Englishman, he saw, looked as doubtful as Salvatore felt.

  “Voglio aiutarti,” Salvatore said to Carlo. “Non credo che tu abbia rapito la bambina, amico.” He brought the first of the tourist photographs onto the screen of his laptop. “Prova,” he murmured. “Prova, prova a guardarle.”

  If Carlo would only try, he himself could do the rest. Just look at the pictures, he silently told the young man. Just move your gaze to the computer screen.

  He went through the entire set in vain. Then he told the addict they would try again. Did he want water? Did he need food? Would another blanket help him through this terrible time?

  “Niente” was the first thing the young man said. Nothing would help him in the state he was in.

  “Per favore,” Salvatore murmured. “Non sono un procuratore. Ti voglio aiutare, Carlo.”

  This was what finally got through to him: I am not a prosecutor, Carlo. I want to help you. To this, Salvatore added that nothing the young man said at this point was being taken down and nothing he said would go into a statement that he would be forced to sign while he was in extremis. They—he and this other officer from London sitting next to your bed, Carlo—were looking for the man who’d kidnapped this child and they did not think Carlo was that man. He had nothing to fear from them. Things could not get worse if he spoke to them now.

  Carlo shifted his gaze. It came to Salvatore that the addict’s pain made movement difficult, and he changed the position of the laptop, holding it on a level with the young man’s face and slowly going through the pictures again. But Carlo said nothing as he looked at them, merely shaking his head as Salvatore paused each one in front of his gaze and asked if there was anyone he recognised as having been with the little girl.

  Again and again, the addict’s lips formed the word No. But finally his expression altered. It was a marginal change, to be true, but his eyebrows made a movement towards each other and his tongue—the colour of it nearly white—touched his scaly upper lip. Salvatore and Lynley saw this simultaneously, and both of them leaned forward to see what picture was on the screen. It was the photograph of the pig’s head at the bancarella selling meats to the citizens of Lucca. It was the photograph in which Lorenzo Mura was making a purchase just beyond the pig’s head.

  “Conosci quest’ uomo?” Salvatore asked.

  Carlo shook his head. He didn’t know him, he said, but he had seen him.

  “Dove?” Salvatore asked, his hope stirring. He glanced at Lynley, and he could see that the London man was watching Carlo closely.

  “Nel parco,” Carlo whispered. “Con un altro uomo.”

  Salvatore asked if Carlo would recognise the other man he spoke of seeing with Lorenzo Mura in the park. He showed the addict an enlargement of the picture of the dark-haired man behind Hadiyyah in the crowd of people. But Carlo shook his head. It wasn’t that man. A few more questions took them to the fact that it also wasn’t Michelangelo Di Massimo with his head of bleached hair. It was someone else, but Carlo didn’t know who. Just that Lorenzo and this other, unnamed man had met, and when they met, the children whom Lorenzo coached in private to improve their football skills were not present. They had been earlier, running about the field, but when this man showed up, all the children were gone.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  The next time Mitchell Corsico got in touch, it was by phone. This was a case of thank-God-for-very-small-favours, though, because the tune he was singing when Barbara took the call was the same tune he’d been singing the last time she’d spoken to him. Things were ramped up at this point, though. The Sun, the Mirror, and the Daily Mail had begun investing some rather significant money in following the kidnapping tale by means of placing boots on the ground in Tuscany. There was competition to get new angles every day, and Mitchell Corsico wanted his own.

  Tiresomely, though, he was back to Met Officer Involved with Love Rat Dad, Barbara discovered. He was also back to making threats. He wanted his bloody exclusive interviews with Azhar and Nafeeza, and Barbara was the means to get them for him. If she didn’t manage this feat, she could expect to see her mug on the front page of The Source, entangled with the son and the father of Azhar in a street imbroglio.

  There was no point in telling him that the angle to pursue was Mother of Kidnapped Girl in Hospital. The Daily Mail was already onto that. For its part, the Mirror was having f
un speculating on what had put Angelina Upman into a hospital bed in the first place. They appeared to like the idea of a suicide attempt—Distraught Mother Ends Up in Hospital—which they were able to hint at since no one in Italy was telling their reporter a single thing.

  Barbara tried to reason with Corsico. “The story’s in Italy,” she told him. “What the bloody hell are you still doing in London trying to follow it, Mitchell?”

  “You and I both know the value of an interview,” Corsico countered. “Don’t pretend you think prowling round some Italian hospital is going to produce shit because we both know that’s bollocks.”

  “Fine. Then interview someone over there. But interviewing Nafeeza or talking to Sayyid again . . . Where the bloody hell is that going to take you?”

  “Give me Lynley, then,” Corsico told her. “Give me his mobile’s number.”

  “If you want to talk to the inspector, you can get your arse over there and talk to the inspector. Hang round the Lucca police station and you’ll see him soon enough. Call the hotels to find him. The town’s not big. How many could there be?”

  “I’m not pursuing the same fucking angle every other paper’s going with. We broke the story and we’re planning to keep breaking it. Joining every Tom, Dick, and Giuseppe over in Tuscany gives me nothing but shit in a basket. Now, way I see it is you’ve got a decision to make. Three choices and I’m giving you thirty seconds to decide once I name them, okay? One: You give me the wife for an interview. Two: You give me Azhar for an interview. Three: I break the Met Officer and Love Rat Dad angle. Come to think, I’ll give you four: You give me Lynley’s mobile. Now. Do I start counting, or do you have a watch to look at to see the seconds flying by while you decide which it’s going to be?”

  “Look, you bloody fool,” Barbara said, “I don’t know how many ways to tell you the story’s in Italy. Lynley’s in Italy, Azhar’s in Italy, Angelina is in hospital in Italy. Hadiyyah’s in Italy and so’s her bloody kidnapper and so’re the police. Now if you want to stay here and follow the Love Rat Dad and whatever the hell you think my involvement with him is supposed to be, more power to you. You can write chapter and verse and another chapter about whatever you imagine our hot love affair is like, and you’ve got your scoop or whatever the hell you want to call it. But another rag is going to pick up the story and want to interview me for my explanation, and what I’m going to tell them—I promise you—is how I’ve been trying to keep The Source from exploiting an anguished teenager’s understandable upset about his dad in order to milk a story out of him that’s sixty percent fury and forty percent fantasy and perhaps they ought to look at the source—pardon the pun—of the story in The Source since for some reason that reporter is fixated on something having nothing to do with a little girl’s disappearance in a foreign country and what does that tell you about the value of even buying a copy of the worthless rag, gentle readers?”

  “Yeah. Right. Brilliant move, Barb. As if the unwashed public out there is the least bit interested in anything beyond gossip. You’re threatening me in the wrong direction. I make my living feeding garbage to the gulls, and they’re eating it up just like always.”

  Barbara knew there was truth in this. Tabloids appealed to the worst inclinations in human nature. They made their money off people’s appetite for learning about others’ sins, corruption, and greed. Because of this fact, however, she had an ace and she knew there was nothing for it but to play the card now.

  “That being the case,” she said to Corsico, “how about a new angle for you, then, one the other tabloids don’t have?”

  “They don’t have Met Officer Involved—”

  “Right. Let’s give that a rest for forty-five seconds. They also don’t have Love Rat Mum Who Took Off with Her Kid in the First Place Now Up the Spout with Yet Another Bloke’s Kid. Trust me on this. They don’t have that story.”

  There was silence at the other end. In it, Barbara could almost hear the wheels of speculation turning in Corsico’s head. Because of those wheels and what they might come up with, she went on.

  “You like that one, Mitchell? It’s gold and it’s true. Now, the bloody story’s in Italy where it’s been all along and I’ve given you something no one else has. You can use it, abuse it, or lose it, okay? As for me, I’ve got other things to do.”

  Then she rang off. Doing this was a risk. Corsico could easily call the bluff of her bravado and run with his story, whose picture on the front page of the paper would call into question how she’d got herself over to Ilford in the first place in the middle of her workday. With John Stewart scrutinising her every move, this was something so far less than desirable that Barbara knew she was in no small part mad to risk alienating Corsico by cutting him off. But she had things to do and none of them were related to dancing to the journalist’s tune just now.

  She’d talked to Lynley. She knew an arrest had been made, but she also knew from his description of things in Lucca that this arrest of one Carlo Casparia was based mostly on the fantasy of the public prosecutor. Lynley had explained to her how investigations proceeded in Italy—with the public prosecutor madly up to his eyeballs in the enquiry almost from the get-go—and he’d also told her that the chief inspector had ideas in conflict with the public prosecutor who headed the investigation, so “Chief Inspector Lo Bianco and I are walking rather carefully over here,” he said. This, she knew, was code for “We’re following our own leads in the matter.” These apparently had to do with Lorenzo Mura, a red convertible, a playing field in a park, and a set of photographs taken by a tourist in the mercato from which Hadiyyah had disappeared. Lynley didn’t say how these things related to each other, but the fact that he and the chief inspector in Italy were not satisfied with the arrest told her that there was still fertile ground to be explored both there and in London and she needed to see about exploring it.

  In this, Isabelle Ardery inadvertently helped out. Since she’d instructed DI Stewart to give Barbara assignments that reflected her rank as a detective sergeant, he’d had no choice but to put her back out in the street with a suitable action assigned to her, one relating to either of the two investigations that he was supposed to be conducting. That the DI wasn’t happy with this turn of events was evident in his surly manner of making the day’s assignments. That he intended to dog Barbara, despite Ardery’s instructions, was evident when he continued watching her like a bird of prey in search of a meal.

  She had phone calls to make before she set out on her given activities, and Stewart placed himself close enough to her to hear every word of them. It was only luck that Corsico had rung her while she was making a purchase at one of the vending machines in the stairwell, Barbara realised.

  She made three phone calls to set up the three interviews she’d been directed by Stewart to conduct. She made a show of taking down times and addresses, and she made more of a show of using the Internet to plot a route from one interview to the next that used her time in an efficacious manner. Then she gathered her notebook and her bag, and she headed out. Luckily Winston Nkata was still at his desk, so she stopped there, flipped open her notebook ostentatiously, and made a show of noting Winston’s replies to her questions.

  These were simple enough. She’d asked him to check on Azhar’s Berlin alibi because she knew she couldn’t risk further censure from Stewart for checking on it herself. So what had he managed to glean? she asked Winston. Was Azhar as good as his word? Had Doughty been telling her the truth when he’d pursued the Berlin story?

  “’S good, Barb,” Winston told her sotto voce. He made a show of pulling out a manila folder, flipping it open, and looking down upon its contents with a studious frown. Barbara glanced to see what he was using as the “evidence” under discussion. Insurance papers for his car, it appeared. “It all checks out square,” he said. “He was at the hotel in Berlin the whole time. He presented two papers like Doughty told you. He was on a panel ’s we
ll.”

  Barbara felt the relief of having one less thing to worry about. Still she said, “D’you think someone could’ve been posing as Azhar?”

  Winston gave her a quirky look. “Barb, the bloke’s a microbiologist, yeah? How’s someone goin to pretend to be that and talk the lingo with th’other blokes? First, a poser’d have to be Pakistani, eh? Second, a poser’d have to be able to talk the talk: present his paper and . . . what else d’they do? . . . answer questions ’bout it? Third, a poser’d have to wonder why the hell he was in Berlin actin the part of Azhar in the first place while Azhar was . . . what? Off in Italy kidnappin his own kid?”

  Barbara chewed on her lip. She thought about what Winston had said. He was right. It was a ludicrous line of enquiry, no matter how she felt about Dwayne Doughty’s half-truths. Still, she knew the wisdom of pursuing every angle, so she said, “What about someone from his lab? What about a graduate student? You know, someone wanting to oil the waters of his path to an advanced degree? How do these things work anyway, being a graduate student? I dunno. Do you?”

  Winston tapped at the battle scar on his cheek. “I look like a bloke knows ’bout university, Barb?” he enquired pleasantly.

  “Ah. Right,” she said. “So . . .”

  “Seems to me ’f you want more information, it’s comin from Doughty. I say you put pressure on him. If there’s more to know out there, he’s the one to tell it.”

  Winston was right, of course. Only pressure on Dwayne Doughty was going to get her any further. Barbara flipped her notebook closed, stowed it in her bag, said, “Right. Got it. Thanks, Winnie,” for John Stewart’s benefit, and went on her way.

  When it came to using the thumbscrews on anyone, the best way was always a visit to the local nick. So on her way to her car, Barbara rang the Bow Road station. She identified herself. She told them that in conjunction with an ongoing case in Italy that officers from Scotland Yard were dealing with, one private investigator Dwayne Doughty needed questioning. Would someone from the local station pick him up, haul him in, and hold him till she got there? Indeed, someone would, she was told. Glad to oblige, DS Havers. He’ll be twiddling his thumbs, stewing in his own juices, or whatever else you wish in an interview room whenever you arrive.