Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “For the love of God, Piero” got Salvatore nowhere. So he agreed—as useless as he knew the endeavour would be—to see in what manner he could prove a conspiracy among three men when two of them did not even know of the existence of the third.

  When Lynley arrived at the questura, Salvatore told him of his visit to the home of the Medici family in Via del Fosso. On a map of the province, he showed him the position of the convent as indicated by the parents of Domenica Medici, caretaker of the place. This could be something or it could be nothing, he explained to the Englishman. But the fact that Squali had been headed in the direction of this place where his cousin lived at least suggested her involvement. Once they had hammered down Di Massimo’s part in what had occurred that day in the mercato, the convent was their next logical move.

  Di Massimo’s arrival caused a stir outside among the paparazzi and the reporters who were hanging about the questura on the scent of a new angle to the story. When he saw them, the Pisan detective covered his head—which, considering the appearance of his yellow hair, didn’t seem like a bad idea—but a covered head indicated an unwillingness to be photographed, which naturally provoked the paparazzi into a frenzy of photographing him on the off chance that he was someone of interest.

  Inside the questura, Di Massimo garnered an equal amount of attention. He wore his motorcycle leathers and wraparound sunglasses so dark that his eyes were hidden. His demands for an avvocato were vociferous and angry. Per favore was not part of what he said.

  Salvatore and DI Lynley met him in an interview room. Four uniformed policemen lined along the wall to emphasise the seriousness of the situation. A tape recorder and a video camera were set up to document the proceedings. These began with polite offers of food and drink and a request for the name of Di Massimo’s lawyer so that the man or woman could be sent for immediately to attend upon the needs of the suspect.

  “Indiziato?” Di Massimo repeated at once. “Non ho fatto niente.”

  Salvatore found it interesting that the Pisan made an immediate declaration of innocence rather than asking what crime he was suspected of having committed. Hearing this, he jerked his head at one of the uniforms and the man produced a file of photographs, which Salvatore laid in front of Di Massimo.

  “Here is what we know, Miko,” he explained as he opened the file and began to place the photographs on the table. “This wretched man”—and here he set before the Pisan three photos of Roberto Squali where he had been found, forty-eight hours dead in the open air of the Apuan Alps—“is the same as this man.” And here he showed him two enlargements taken from the tourist photos: Roberto Squali standing behind the missing English girl and Roberto Squali having in his hand a greeting card that appeared to be later in the hand of the girl.

  Di Massimo glanced at these, and as he did so, Salvatore reached over and removed his sunglasses. Di Massimo flinched and demanded them returned. An “un attimo” from Salvatore told him that all things—good, bad, and indifferent—would come quite soon.

  “I do not know this man,” Di Massimo said, folding his leather-clad arms across his chest.

  “You have hardly looked at the pictures, my friend.”

  “I do not need to look more closely to tell you I have no idea who he might be.”

  Salvatore nodded thoughtfully. “Then you will wonder, Michelangelo, why he took so many phone calls from you in the weeks preceding the kidnap of this girl”—he indicated Hadiyyah—“and why he made such a large deposit of cash to his bank account once she went missing. It is a small matter, you know, for us to discover if the amount of this deposit mirrors a withdrawal from your own reserves. That is being arranged, in fact, even as we speak.”

  Michelangelo said nothing, but along his hairline, minuscule drops of perspiration appeared.

  “I’m still waiting for the name of your avvocato, by the way,” Salvatore added graciously. “He will want to advise you on the best manner in which to extricate yourself from the web you’re caught in.”

  Di Massimo said nothing. Salvatore let him think. The Pisan would have no way of knowing exactly how much information the police had at this point, but the fact that he’d been brought to the questura was going to suggest that his trouble was deep. Since he’d already denied knowing a man to whom he’d made numerous telephone calls, his best move would be to tell the truth. Even if he’d phoned Squali a dozen times without ever having seen the man, the police still had a connection between them and this had to be explained away somehow. Salvatore’s only question was how fast Di Massimo could cook up an explanation that had nothing to do with Hadiyyah’s disappearance. He was betting that anyone who bleached his normally black hair the colour of mais was not someone who was also fast on his intellectual feet.

  It turned out that his surmise was correct. Di Massimo said, “Bene,” on a sigh. And he began to tell his tale.

  He was hired to find the child, as he had earlier admitted when the chief inspector had questioned him, no? He was hired, he found her, and he’d thought no more of the matter once he had reported her whereabouts at Fattoria di Santa Zita in the hills above Lucca. But some weeks later another, altogether different request had been made for his services. And this request was in relation to the very same child.

  “What were these services?” Salvatore asked.

  The orchestration of her kidnapping, he replied baldly. It was up to him to decide where this kidnapping would occur. The key to it, though, had to be the child’s complete lack of fear. So he set about hiring someone to watch the family in order to find if there was anything they did that could serve the purpose of spiriting her away: something that was so much a part of their regular routine that they would never imagine anything untoward could happen to the child in the midst of it and, thus, their guard would be down. The person he hired was Roberto Squali, whom he knew as a cameriere at a restaurant in Pisa.

  The family’s weekly trips to the mercato in Lucca, as reported by Squali, proved to be the event he was looking for. The child’s mother went off to yoga, her lover and her daughter went into the mercato, and there the child and the man separated so that she could watch the accordion player and his poodle. That constituted the perfect moment to snatch her, Di Massimo had concluded, but of course the snatching could not be carried out by someone as memorable in appearance as the Pisan private detective. Hence, he’d instructed Roberto Squali to carry it out.

  “The child appears to have gone with Roberto willingly,” Salvatore said. “She seems to have taken directions from him because she left the mercato on a route she’d never taken before and he followed her. There is a witness to this.”

  Di Massimo nodded. “Again, there was to be no fear. I gave him a word to say to her that would reassure her she had nothing to worry about.”

  “A word?”

  “Khushi.”

  “What sort of word is this?”

  “A word I myself was given. What it means I do not know.” Di Massimo went on to say that Roberto was to tell Hadiyyah that he had come to take her to her father. He supplied Squali with a greeting card that he had been told her father had written to her. Roberto was to hand her this card and then to say this magic word khushi, which appeared to be some kind of open sesame to garner her complete cooperation. Once he had her in his company, he was to take her to a place that was safe, where she would not feel herself in any danger. There she would stay until the word came to Michelangelo that the child was to be released. With that word would also come the location of her release. He would pass this information along to Roberto Squali, who would fetch the girl, take her to the drop-off point, and leave her there for whatever was going to happen next.

  Salvatore felt a wave of nausea. “What,” he asked evenly, “was to happen next?”

  Di Massimo didn’t know. He only received bits and pieces of the plan when and as he needed to know them. And that was how it had worked from
the first.

  “Whose plan was this, then?” Salvatore asked.

  “I’ve already said. A man from London.”

  Lynley stirred in his chair. “Are you saying that from the first, a man from London hired you to kidnap Hadiyyah?”

  Di Massimo shook his head. No, no, and no. As he’d told them before, he had been hired first merely to find the child. It was only after she had been found that he was then later asked to arrange for her kidnapping. He hadn’t wanted to do it—a bambina should never be separated from her mamma, vero? But when he’d been told about how this particular mamma had once abandoned this same child for a year to chase after a lover . . . This was not right, this was not good, this was not the comportamento of a good mamma, no? So he had agreed to snatch the child. For money, of course. Which, by the way, he had not yet received in full. So much for trusting the word of a foreigner.

  “This foreigner was . . . ?” Lynley asked.

  “Dwayne Doughty, as I’ve said from the first. The plan from start to finish was his. Why he wanted the child to be taken instead of merely reunited with her papà . . . ? This I do not know and I did not ask.”

  VILLA RIVELLI

  TUSCANY

  Sister Domenica Giustina was harvesting strawberries when she was summoned. She was using scissors to cut the fruit from the plants. She was humming an Ave that she particularly liked, and its sweet air moved her among her plants with a lightness of gait that she hadn’t known in all the time she had been in this place.

  Her long period of punishment was ended. She’d bathed and clothed herself anew, using upon her many wounds an ointment she herself had made. These wounds would cease their suppurating soon. Such were the loving ways of God.

  When she heard her name called, she rose from the strawberries. She saw that a novice had come from the convent, the fresh breeze stirring her pure white veil. Sister Domenica Giustina recognised the young woman, although she did not know her name. A badly repaired cleft palate had left her face uneven, giving her the appearance of permanent sorrow. She was no more than twenty-three years old. That she was at this age a novice in the order of nuns spoke to how long she had lived among them.

  She said, “You’re wanted inside, Domenica. You’re to come at once.”

  Sister Domenica Giustina’s spirit leapt like a doe within her. She had not been inside the holy body of the convent in years, not since the day she’d learned she would not be allowed to live among the good sisters who were immured in sanctity there. She’d only been permitted a few steps inside the kitchen on the pianoterra. Five paces from the door to the huge pine table where she left for the nuns whatever she’d gleaned from the garden, made from the milk of the goats, or gathered from the chickens. And even then she entered only when no one else was present. That she knew this particular nun—her summoner—by her appearance was owing to having seen her arrive in the company of her parents on a summer day.

  “Mi segua,” the novice told Sister Domenica Giustina. She turned, expecting the other woman to follow.

  Sister Domenica Giustina did as she had been told. She would have preferred to wash the dirt from her hands, perhaps to change her clothes. But to be asked into the convent—for surely that was the intention, no?—was a gift from which she could not turn. So she brushed off her hands, shook off her linen shift, clasped a pocketed rosary in her fingers, and followed the nun.

  They went in through the great front doors, another gift to Sister Domenica Giustina and surely a sign as well. These gave onto what had once been the immense soggiorno of the villa, a reception room whose walls soared up to a fresco in which the magnificent god Apollo drove a chariot across an azure sky. Far beneath him, what affreschi had decorated the walls had long ago been whitewashed over. And whatever great silk-covered divani had been positioned to accommodate guests to the villa were ages gone and replaced by simple wooden pews that fanned out in front of an equally simple and rough-hewn altar. This was covered by fine, starched linen. On it stood an elaborate tabernacle of gold, accompanied by a single candle encased in red glass. The candle in red indicated that the Sacrament was present. They genuflected before it.

  The air was tinctured by the unmistakable scent of incense, a heady fragrance that Sister Domenica Giustina had not smelled in many years. She was pleased when the other woman told her to wait in this place. She nodded, knelt upon the hard tiles of the floor, and crossed herself.

  She found she couldn’t pray. There was too much to see, too much to experience. She tried to discipline herself, but her excitement was great, and it drove her gaze first here and then there as she took in the place where she’d been left.

  The chapel was dark, its windows covered by both shutters and grilles. The great doors to the loggia at the rear of the villa and behind the altar were boarded, and tapestries made by the fingers of the women within this place hung from these boards and presented scenes from the life of St. Dominic, namesake of the order of nuns who celebrated him in their needlework. Corridors led to the right and to the left from the chapel, taking one into the heart of the convent. Sister Domenica Giustina longed to wander along them, but she remained. Obedience was one of the vows. This moment was a test, and she would pass it.

  “Vieni, Domenica.”

  The voice asking her to come was barely a whisper, and for a moment Sister Domenica Giustina thought the Blessed Virgin herself had spoken. But a hand on her shoulder told her the voice was not disembodied, and she looked up to see an ancient lined face nearly hidden within the folds of a black veil.

  Sister Domenica Giustina rose. The old nun nodded and, hands tucked into the sleeves of her habit, she turned and made for one of the corridors. Its opening was covered by an intricate lattice of wood, but this moved inward upon the slightest push and soon enough Sister Domenica Giustina and her companion were in a whitewashed corridor with closed heavy doors along one side and shuttered windows along the other. A few paces took them to one of the doors upon which the vecchia knocked softly. Someone spoke behind it. The old nun indicated that Sister Domenica Giustina was to enter, and when she had done so, the door was closed behind her.

  She was in an office, simply furnished. A prie-dieu stood before a statue of the Virgin, who gazed lovingly down upon anyone wishing to pray at her feet. Across from her, St. Dominic held out his hands in blessing from a niche. Between two shuttered windows stood an uncluttered desk. At this desk sat the woman Sister Domenica Giustina had met only twice: She was Mother Superior, and she looked upon Sister Domenica Giustina with an expression of such gravity that Sister Domenica Giustina knew the moment of import had arrived.

  She’d never felt such joy. She could sense it blazing out of her face because she could feel it coursing throughout her body. She had indeed been a terrible sinner, but now she had finally been forgiven. She had fully prepared her soul for God, and not only her own but the soul of another.

  For years she had been penitent. She had striven to illustrate to God, through her actions, that she understood how weighty her sins had been. To pray that an unborn child—the child of her own cousin Roberto—would be taken from her body so that her parents would never learn she had carried it . . . To have that prayer granted on the very night that her parents were gone from the house . . . To have Roberto there to dispose of what had been forced so painfully from her body there in the darkness of the bathroom . . .

  It had been alive, fully formed and alive, but even this matter had felt the hand of God. For a mere five months inside her had not been enough for it to live without help and that help had been denied. Or so she had come to believe because Roberto had it, Roberto had taken it, and Roberto had disposed of it. Girl or boy, she did not know. She had never known . . . until everything changed, until Roberto had made everything change.

  Sister Domenica Giustina did not realise she had spoken all of this aloud until Mother Superior rose from behind her desk. She leaned
upon it, her knuckles a stark white contrast to the colour of the wood, and she murmured, “Madre di Dio, Domenica. Madre di Dio.”

  So, yes and yes, the child from her body had not died because God worked in ways too miraculous for His humble servants ever to understand. Her cousin had returned their child into her keeping to shelter her from harm, and this is what Sister Domenica Giustina had done, up until the moment when God took the girl’s father in a terrible accident among the Alps. And she—Sister Domenica Giustina—was left to try to understand what this meant. For beyond the miraculous, God also worked in incomprehensible ways and one had to struggle to understand the messages contained within His works.

  “We all must prove ourselves to God,” Sister Domenica Giustina concluded. “She asked me for her papà. God told me what to do. For only by doing His will—no matter how difficult—do we achieve the complete forgiveness we seek.” She crossed herself. She smiled and she felt beatific, blessed by God at last to come into this place.

  Mother Superior was breathing shallowly. Her fingers touched the golden ring she wore. They pressed against the crucifix upon it as if asking the martyred Lord for the strength to speak. “For the love of God, Domenica,” she said. “What have you done to this child?”

  30 April