Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  Excellent, she thought. She gave a look to the locations of the interviews she needed to conduct for DI Stewart. One was south of the river; the other two were in north London. Bow Road was east. In the world of eenie, meenie, minie, and moe, there was no question in her mind where she would go first.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  By the time Salvatore and DI Lynley had returned from their questioning of Carlo Casparia in the prison hospital, the officers tracking down the cars driven by every member of Lorenzo Mura’s squadra di calcio had finished that job. There was one red car among all the vehicles, but it was not a convertible. No matter, Salvatore told them. It was now time to trace the cars belonging to the families of every child Lorenzo coached in his private calcio clinic at the Parco Fluviale. Get the name of every child he coaches from Mura, get the name of every parent of every child, check their cars, then speak to each parent individually about meeting Lorenzo Mura there for a private conversation. Meantime, get a photograph of every father of every child and dig up pictures of Lorenzo’s fellow team members as well.

  DI Lynley remained silent during this exchange, although Salvatore could tell from the expression on the Englishman’s face that he hadn’t followed the rapid-fire Italian around him. So he explained how they were proceeding, and to this Lynley indicated the nature of the report he would make to the parents of the girl. Obviously, reporting anything having to do with Lorenzo Mura was out of the question. For the moment, then, it was best to tell them that information from the television appeal was continuing to be followed up on, that Carlo Casparia was attempting to be helpful, and to leave it at that.

  Lynley was departing when a uniformed officer dashed down the corridor to speak to Salvatore. His face was flushed and his news was good: Regarding the red convertible seen by the driver on his way to visit his mamma in the Apuan Alps? the young man said breathlessly.

  “Sì, sì,” Salvatore responded tersely.

  It had been found. Checking every lay-by on the road into the Alps prior to the turnoff for the mamma’s village had gleaned them nothing, as the chief inspector would recall. But an enterprising officer had on his own time continued up that mountain road and six kilometres farther along he had found a crash barrier destroyed on a hairpin turn. The car in question had been discovered at the bottom of a gully beyond that barrier. There was no body inside. But there was a body some twenty metres away: the driver’s, apparently thrown from the vehicle.

  “Andiamo,” Salvatore said at once to Lynley. Pray God, he thought, that there was no small girl’s body nearby as well.

  It took nearly an hour to reach the turnoff, their route coursing along the River Serchio, first on the great alluvial plain, then into the hills, and at last into the Alps. The river was a fast-moving torrent at this time of year since snow at the highest elevation in the mountains had been melting for weeks. The result was waterfalls, sunstruck cascades, and glittering pools, all of which could be glimpsed as the police car rushed past them. The new growth of spring was thick and lush as they climbed into the mountains, and the wildflowers splashed yellow, violet, and red in swathes of colour along verges and into the trees. And the trees themselves—pines, oaks, and ilexes—grew right to the edges of villages that had no vehicular access, forming a wall of greenery that seemed to prevent the mountains themselves from descending upon and swallowing up the scattering of terracotta-roofed buildings perched precariously on the edges of cliffs that dropped hundreds of feet into more forest beneath them.

  With each turn they made into a secondary or tertiary road, the way narrowed until they were at last on a route the width of the car itself. One hairpin curve followed the next. It was an ear-popping, white-knuckle ride, a by-the-grace-of-God course in which God’s grace was defined by having the luck not to encounter a vehicle on its way down. Finally, they came to a police roadblock. They got out of the car, and Salvatore nodded at the uniformed officer who approached. He asked him only, “Dov’è la macchina?” although this was mere formality since the likely position of the red convertible was indicated some fifty metres farther along and up, by the remains of the crash barrier through which the vehicle had shot to its final resting place.

  As Salvatore and Lynley approached the broken barrier, an ambulance crew came into sight, heaving a stretcher between them. On it, a body bag was strapped, its zip tightly closed, sealing the corpse from sight.

  “Fermatevi,” Salvatore told the two attendants. He added, “Per favore” as an afterthought and introduced both himself and DI Lynley to them.

  They did as he asked, halting their progress to the waiting ambulance. They set the stretcher on the ground, and Salvatore squatted. He steeled himself—only on television, he thought, did detectives unzip the body bags of corpses who’d lain for God only knew how many days in the hot Italian sun without preparing themselves for what they were about to see—and he lowered the zip.

  Had the man been handsome in life—indeed, had he possibly been the individual behind Hadiyyah in the photographs taken by the tourists in the mercato—it was now impossible to tell. Those forensic specialists of the open air—the insects—had found the body as they would do, and they had worked their ways upon it. Maggots still writhed in the man’s eyes, nose, and mouth; beetles had been feasting on his skin; mites and millipedes scurried into the open neck of his linen shirt. He had come to rest facedown, as well, and the settling of blood to this part of his body rendered his features purple while the gas forming within the protective covering of his skin as his tissues disintegrated had created pustules wherever he was exposed. Soon these would leak their noxious fluid, which would also seep from his orifices. Death in this manner was a horrifying sight. Nothing immured one from its impact.

  Salvatore gave Lynley a look and heard the other officer whistle low as he blew out a breath and gazed on the remains. Salvatore said to the ambulance attendants, “Carta d’identità?” and they indicated with a simultaneous jerking of their heads that whoever was with the car below had in their possession the man’s identification. Salvatore nodded and rose, thankful that he was not going to have to go through the corpse’s pockets. He indicated that the body could be taken off for postmortem examination. Then, with Lynley, he approached the edge of the bluff.

  Far below them was the red convertible. Two uniformed officers were with it, while two others were smoking up above them where an area of ground at the base of a boulder some eighty metres higher than the car was marked to indicate the position of the corpse. He had obviously been thrown from the vehicle as it crashed down the bluff. Wearing a seatbelt or not, he would not have survived the car’s rolling sotto sopra as it soared from the road to its resting place. The miracle involved was that the vehicle had not burst into flames. This led to the possibility of evidence. Salvatore hoped it was evidence of life, however, and not evidence of a second individual in the convertible when it took its fatal plunge, and hence not evidence of a second body still undiscovered in the area.

  Carefully, he and Lynley worked their way down to the point where the man’s body had lain. He gave the officers there terse instructions: “Cercate se ce n’è un altro.” If there was another body nearby, they were to find it.

  They didn’t look happy about this turn of events but when he added, “Una bambina. Cercate subito,” their expressions altered and they set off. If a little girl’s body was somewhere nearby, it probably wasn’t going to be far.

  At the car, Salvatore repeated his question about the man’s identification. An evidence bag was passed to him by one of the two officers at the vehicle. Inside was a black portafoglio. It had been tucked inside the glove box of the car, the car itself a wreck of mangled metal with one wheel missing, three others flattened, and a door ripped off. While Salvatore opened the evidence bag and removed the wallet within it, Lynley moved to look more closely at the vehicle.

  The man was one Roberto Squali, Salvatore saw
from his identity card. He felt a rush of excitement to see that the man was a Lucchese. This had to take them, he believed, another step closer to the missing child. Pray God she hadn’t ended up here, he thought as he looked round at the wilderness. His hope lay in the fact that at least ten days separated the girl’s vanishing at the mercato from the moment when this accident had occurred. How likely was it that she would have been in the car with this man so long after her kidnapping in Lucca?

  Within Squali’s wallet, Salvatore also found the man’s driving licence, two credit cards, and five business cards. Three of these were from boutiques in Lucca, one was from a restaurant in the town, and the fifth was the link he had prayed to see: something that tied this man to Michelangelo Di Massimo. It was the private investigator’s card and on it was his name, the number of his mobile, and the address of his questionable centre of operations in Pisa.

  “Guardi qui,” Salvatore said to Lynley. He handed the card to him, waited while the other man put on his reading spectacles, and met his gaze when Lynley looked up quickly. “Sì,” Salvatore said with a smile. “Addesso abbiamo la prova che sono connessi.”

  “Penso proprio di sì,” Lynley said in agreement. They had their tie between the two men. “E la bambina?” he continued. “Che pensa?”

  Salvatore looked round them and then up at the mountains that surrounded them on every side. The little girl had been with this man, he thought. He was sure of that. But not at the moment when he’d gone over the cliff. He told Lynley this and the London man nodded. Salvatore returned to his inspection of the car, however, and soon enough he had what he was looking for.

  It was a hair caught up in the mechanics of the seatbelt. It was long. It was dark. A test would tell them if it was Hadiyyah’s. Dusting the vehicle for prints would also tell them if the child had ridden in the car. The only piece of information that the car couldn’t give them was what had happened to her and where she was now.

  Both men knew the hard reality of the situation with which they were faced, however: If Roberto Squali had indeed taken Hadiyyah from the mercato in Lucca, if he indeed had been the man seen leading a little girl into the woods somewhere along this road from which his car had toppled, where was she now? What had happened to her? For the truth was that the area in which they stood was vast, and if Squali had handed the child off to another or had killed and disposed of her somewhere to fulfill a sick fantasy, the location in which either of these things had occurred was going to prove almost impossible to find.

  Salvatore considered cadaver dogs. Pray God, he thought, they would not have to use them.

  VILLA RIVELLI

  TUSCANY

  Sister Domenica Giustina was light-headed from the fasting. She was sore from kneeling on the hard stone floor. She was thick in the brain from going without sleep, and she was still waiting for God to send her a sign about what it was He wished her to do next.

  She’d failed with Carina. The child simply had not understood the crucial importance of what had lain before them both. Something within her had stirred her to fear and trepidation. And now, instead of joyful acceptance, curious playfulness, and eager cooperation with every aspect of life at the Villa Rivelli, the child kept her distance from Sister Domenica Giustina. She watched and she waited. Sometimes, she hid. This was not good.

  Sister Domenica Giustina had begun to think that she had, perhaps, misinterpreted what she’d seen as she’d watched her cousin’s car come roaring up the narrow mountain road. She’d known God’s hand was behind the car’s ripping through the crash barrier, flying into space, and disappearing. What she did not know and had to clarify was what it meant that God had placed her at that precise moment in a position to see what end had been met by her cousin Roberto. The sight of his car shooting into the void had seemed an illustration of the importance of being shriven of sins, but perhaps it meant something else entirely.

  For this reason had she fasted and prayed. As a form of scourging, she tightened the swaddling that was a torment to her flesh. At the end of forty-eight hours like this, she rose with some difficulty but without the peace of knowing what she was meant to do. God’s answer hadn’t come from her suffering and her supplication. Perhaps, she thought, it would come from careful attention to a soft breeze that she could hear blowing through the trees of the forest that edged the immediate grounds of the villa. Perhaps God’s voice would be on that breeze.

  She went outside. She felt the restorative light wind on her cheeks. She paused at the top of the stone steps that led to her rooms above the barn, and she gazed upon the shuttered villa and wondered if the answers she sought might be contained within its walls. For she needed answers soon at this point. Roberto’s terrible passage from the mountain road into the vacancy of space told her that.

  She descended the stone steps. She began to consider an important way in which she might have misunderstood. She’d been dwelling upon Roberto’s demise when, perhaps, he had not met his end at all. If that was the case, then seeking God’s message in the death of her cousin would be a completely useless activity. She should, in other words, have been seeking God’s message in something else.

  There would be a sign of this. There had always been signs, and if she was correct in this new understanding, something was going to tell her soon. It seemed to her that the only place a sign might come to her was the same spot where she’d seen the last sign. So she went to where the low wall allowed her a view of the road that twisted up from the valley floor, and in very short order, she was given precisely what she had been praying for.

  Even at this distance from the place where Roberto’s car had crashed through the barrier, she could see the police cars. More important, she could see that among them un’ambulanza stood. As she watched, so far from them, she made out the workers carrying a stretcher up from some point below the twist of road. When they had lifted it onto the tarmac, they paused, and someone waiting for them bent over the stretcher as if to have a word with whoever rode upon it. This did not take long, after which the stretcher was loaded into the ambulance and it drove away.

  Sister Domenica Giustina watched all this, her heart feeling as if it would catch in her chest. It was hard to believe what she was witnessing, but there could be no doubt in interpreting what she’d seen. Even as she had prayed and fasted within her cell, seeking to understand God’s intention for her, her cousin Roberto had lain injured within the wreckage of his car. It came to Sister Domenica Giustina that both she and her cousin Roberto had been challenged. Have faith through suffering, their God had proclaimed. I will move in your life as I will.

  It was challenge, she realised. It was all about challenge. It was about not giving up for an instant, no matter the blackness of what lay ahead.

  Job had faced this. Abraham had faced this as well. In the case of that great patriarch of the Hebrews, the challenge he’d endured surpassed any other that God had ever given to man. Sacrifice your son Isaac to me, God had demanded of his servant Abraham. Take him into the mountains, build an altar of stone, and upon that altar put your sword to his throat. Let his blood flow forth. Burn his body. In this way prove your love for Me. This will not be easy, but it is what I ask. Obey your God.

  Yes, yes, she understood at last. A challenge such as Abraham’s could only be a challenge if it was not easy.

  BOW

  LONDON

  She would get it all done, Barbara told herself. But first she had to talk to Doughty. After that, she’d be back on track, heading south of the river first and then doing the north London bit at the end of the day. These things always took time. No interview went like clockwork. She would be able to smooth the rough edges of her day’s employment in such a way as to please anyone who decided to scrutinise it.

  At the Bow Road station she identified herself and was in short order escorted to the interview room in which Dwayne Doughty was cooling his heels. He’d been there for more th
an an hour, she was told. His sole reaction so far had been the demand of “What the hell is going on, you sods?”

  When she walked into the room, Doughty said, “You again?” At the narrow table, he had a plastic cup of tea with a skin of cooling milk formed on its surface. He shoved this to one side, and its contents sloshed out. “Bloody hell,” he went on. “I’ve told you everything. What more do you want from me?”

  Barbara evaluated him before she spoke. He wasn’t as cool a customer as he’d been in their earlier encounters, so she reckoned this jaunt to the nick had been a very good idea. A sour smell came off him—he must have begun sweating like a glass holding a bad martini the moment uniforms had shown up in his office—and he’d loosened his necktie and unbuttoned the top of his shirt to reveal a band of oily sweat round the inside of the collar.

  “What the fuck is this about?” he demanded.

  She sat. She put her shoulder bag on the floor and took her time about digging out her notebook and pencil. She flipped the notebook open and then studied the detective. “Azhar’s alibi checks out,” she told him.

  He exploded like an overblown balloon. “I bloody told you that!” he snapped. “I looked into it myself. You paid me to do it, I did it, I made my report to you, and if that doesn’t prove to you that I’m walking on the sodding right side of the bleeding law—”

  “The only thing that’s ever going to prove that is the full truth, Dwayne. The whole A to Z of it, if you read my meaning.”

  “I’ve given you the full truth. I’ve got nothing more to give. This ‘interview’ or whatever the hell you’re up to here is bloody well over. I know my rights, and one of them isn’t to sit here and have you harp on things we’ve already discussed. The cops asked me to come in for a few questions. I came in cooperatively. And now I’m leaving.” He shoved back from the table.