Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  He fetched Lynley from their regular luogo di incontro by Porta di Borgo. To the Englishman’s “Che cosa succede?” he tersely explained where they were with the collection of photos, with Lorenzo Mura, and with the need for swiftness. He spoke of this latter matter by using terms that dealt with “concerns of il Pubblico Ministero.” What he didn’t tell him was that he had been officially removed from the investigation.

  He didn’t seem to need to, as things turned out. The Englishman’s brown eyes observed him steadily as he parted with those details he had. He even suggested politely that perhaps a siren would speed their journey . . . ? It would assist in bringing matters to a swift conclusion for you, Ispettore, he pointed out.

  So it was with the siren blaring and the lights flashing that Salvatore and Lynley left the city. They shared little conversation as they stormed in the direction of the Alps and a convent hidden high among them.

  It was called Villa Rivelli, he’d discovered. It housed a cloistered order of Dominican nuns. It was situated northwest of the point at which the unfortunate Roberto Squali had met his end, and the road that Squali had been driving upon was the single route to get to the place.

  There was virtually nothing nearby, as they found when they reached the area, just a cluster of houses perhaps two kilometres in advance of the turnoff. At one time long ago these houses would have served the needs of whoever had lived within the great villa. Now they were the shuttered vacation homes of foreigners and of wealthy Italians who came to the mountains from cities like Milano and Bologna, to escape urban bustle and summer heat. It was early in the season yet, so the likelihood of anyone within the houses seeing Roberto Squali pass by several weeks ago with a child in his car was too remote to be considered. Wisdom would have dictated that Squali make his move with the child in midafternoon anyway. At that time of day, no one stirred in a place like this. People moved from pranzo directly to letto for a nap. They would have noticed nothing, even if they’d been at their houses this time of year.

  When they reached the lane that led to Villa Rivelli, Salvatore nearly missed it altogether, so sheltered was it by looming oaks and Aleppo pines and so untravelled it appeared. Only a small wooden sign topped with a cross saved him from passing it by altogether. It was carved with V Rivelli upon it, but the letters were worn and the wood was lichenous.

  The lane was narrow, cluttered with the woodland debris of a hundred winters. It had never been paved, so they lurched their way down it. They came to a great iron gate that stood open far enough to allow a car’s passage. When he’d eased the car past the ornate wrought iron, he followed the driveway to the left, along a tall hedge from which birds burst, past a few decrepit outbuildings, a huge woodpile, and a ruspa that was more rust than steel.

  The silence was complete. As the lane climbed upward, nothing broke into the stillness. So it was with some surprise that Salvatore turned into a car’s-width opening perhaps a kilometre from the road below and saw, beyond the hedge, a great lawn at the other side of which stood the baroque beauty of the Villa Rivelli. Aside from the fact that it was completely abandoned in appearance, it didn’t seem like a dwelling for an order of cloistered nuns. For the front of the building was fashioned with tall niches in which marble statues stood, and a single glance at them told the tale of the identities, which had more to do with Roman gods and goddesses than with saints of the Roman Catholic Church. But these were not what surprised Salvatore. It was the presence of three cars from the carabinieri that caused him to glance at Lynley and to worry that they might be too late.

  The arrival of police at a cloistered convent was not a simple matter of knocking on the door and gaining admittance. The women within did not see visitors. Chances were better than good that if the carabinieri were present, it was because the carabinieri had been summoned. It was with this in mind that Salvatore and Lynley approached two armed officers who were gazing at them expressionlessly through very dark glasses.

  It was, Salvatore discovered, much as he’d thought. A telephone call from the convent had brought them to this remote villa. Captain Mirenda had been admitted, and she was presumably speaking to whoever had made the call. As for the rest of them . . . ? They were having a look round the grounds. It was a beautiful spot on a beautiful day, eh? Such a pity that the ladies who lived here never got to enjoy what it had to offer. Giardini, fontane, stagni, un bosco . . . The officer shook his head at the waste of such pleasures.

  “Dov’è l’ingresso?” Salvatore asked him. For it didn’t seem conceivable that access to the convent was gained by merely knocking upon the two great front doors. In this, he was right. The superior officer of the two carabinieri had gone round the side of the building. Salvatore and Lynley did the same. They found yet another officer stationed outside of a plain door set down a few steps. To him, they showed their identification.

  The police were notoriously territorial in this part of the world. Because there were so many divisions of them, turf wars were common when it came to an investigation. Often the first branch of polizia on the scene was the branch that wrested control of an investigation, and this was particularly the case when it came to the polizia di stato and the carabinieri. But things were much different on this day, Salvatore found. After examining their identification and gazing at them both as if their faces held secret information for him, the officer stepped away from the door. When it came to entering the convent, they could suit themselves.

  They went in through a vast kitchen, which was completely deserted. They climbed a stone stairway, their footsteps echoing between the plastered walls. The stairway took them into a corridor, which was also deserted. This they followed and finally arrived in a chapel, where a candle lit for the Sacrament was the first indication of life in the building since someone from within would have had to light it unless Captain Mirenda had done the honours.

  Four separate corridors led from the chapel, each of them at a corner of the room and one of which they’d just travelled. Salvatore was trying to decide which of the remaining three might lead them to a human presence, when he heard the sound of women’s voices, just a quiet murmur in what otherwise would have been a place of silence and contemplation. Footsteps accompanied these voices. Someone said, “Certo, certo. Non si preoccupi. Ha fatto bene.”

  Two women emerged from behind a wooden lattice that served to cover the doorway of the corridor nearest the chapel’s altar. One of them wore the habit of a Dominican nun. The other wore the uniform of a carabinieri captain. The nun halted abruptly, the first of them to catch sight of the two men—both in the clothing of civilians—standing in the convent chapel. She looked behind her for a moment, as if to retreat to safety behind the lattice, and Captain Mirenda spoke sharply.

  “Chi sono?” This was, she told them, a cloistered convent. How had they gained entrance?

  Salvatore identified himself and explained who Lynley was. They were there, he said, on the matter of the English girl who had vanished from Lucca, and he felt confident that Captain Mirenda was aware of that case.

  She was, of course. How could she be otherwise since, unlike the nun who’d stepped into the shadows, she did not live in a protected world. But it seemed that she had either been summoned to the convent on another matter entirely, or she had not connected the reason she’d been summoned to anything that had gone before this moment, especially in a mercato in Lucca.

  The nun murmured something. In the shadows, her face was hidden.

  Salvatore explained that he and his companion were going to have to speak to the Mother Superior. He went on to say that he knew it was irregular for any of the nuns to meet with an outsider—particularly if that outsider was male—but there was an urgent need since a direct relationship existed between a young woman of the name of Domenica Medici and a man who had taken the little girl from Lucca.

  Captain Mirenda glanced at the other woman. She said, “Che cosa vorrebbe fare?
”

  Salvatore wanted to tell her that it was not a matter of what the nun wished to do at this point. This was a police matter, and the traditions of the cloister were going to have to be set aside. Where, he enquired, was Domenica Medici? Her parents had indicated she lived in this place. Roberto Squali had died on his way here. Evidence in his car proved the child had been a passenger at some point.

  Captain Mirenda told them to wait in the chapel. Salvatore didn’t like this, but he decided a compromise was in order. The carabinieri had sent a woman for obvious reasons, and if it was down to her to open doors in this place, he could live with that.

  She took the arm of the nun, and together they disappeared behind the lattice from which they’d emerged. In a few minutes, though, the captain was back. With her was a different nun altogether, and she didn’t shrink from their presence as had the other. This was Mother Superior, Captain Mirenda told them. It was she who had summoned the carabinieri to Villa Rivelli.

  “Your wish is to see Domenica Medici?” Mother Superior was tall and stately, appearing ageless in her black-and-white habit. She wore the rimless spectacles that Salvatore remembered on the nuns of his youth. Then those glasses had seemed quirky, an antique fashion long out of vogue. Now they seemed trendy, striking an odd note of modernity out of keeping with the rest of Mother Superior’s attire. Behind the glasses, she fixed upon him a gaze that he remembered only too well from the classroom. It demanded truth, and it suggested that anything less would be quickly uncovered.

  He recounted what he’d learned from the parents of Domenica Medici: that she lived on the grounds of Villa Rivelli and that she served as a caretaker. He added to this what he’d already told Captain Mirenda. This was a matter of some importance, he concluded. A child’s disappearance was involved.

  It was Captain Mirenda who spoke. “Domenica Medici is here on the grounds,” she said. “And there is no child within the convent walls.”

  “You have made a search?” Salvatore said.

  “I have not needed to,” Captain Mirenda said.

  For a moment, Salvatore thought she meant that the word of Mother Superior was good enough, and he could tell that Lynley thought the same, for the other man stirred next to him and said quietly, “Strano,” in a low voice.

  Strange indeed, Salvatore thought. But Mother Superior clarified. There was a child, she said. From within the convent, she herself had both seen and heard her. She had assumed the girl was a relative come to stay for a time with Domenica. The reason for this was that she’d been delivered to the place by Domenica’s cousin. She played on the grounds of the villa and helped Domenica with her work. That she might not have been a member of Domenica’s family had not occurred to anyone in the convent.

  “They have no contact here with the outside world,” Captain Mirenda said. “They did not know that a child has gone missing from Lucca.”

  Salvatore very nearly didn’t want to ask why the carabinieri had been sent for, then. This was of no import, however, since DI Lynley did the asking himself.

  Because of the screaming, Mother Superior told them quietly. And because of the tale Domenica had told when she’d been sent for by the nun and questioned about it.

  “Lei crede che la bambina sia sua,” Captain Mirenda interjected abruptly.

  Her own child? Salvatore thought. “Perché?” he asked.

  “È pazza” was the captain’s answer.

  Salvatore knew from speaking to Domenica’s parents that the girl was, perhaps, not right in the head. But for her to believe that the child brought here by her cousin was her own daughter took things in a direction so strange that it suggested the girl was, indeed, more mad than she was slow.

  Mother Superior’s quiet voice filled in the rest of the details and comprised the information she’d gathered preceding her phone call. This man who had brought the child to the villa had once made Domenica pregnant. She’d been seventeen at the time. She was now twenty-six. To the poor girl, the age of the child seemed right. But it was, of course, no child of hers.

  “Perché?” Salvatore asked the nun.

  Again, the captain answered for her. “She prayed for God to take that child from her body so that her parents would never know she was pregnant.”

  “È successo così?” Lynley asked.

  “Sì,” Captain Mirenda confirmed. That was indeed what had occurred. Or at least that was the tale Domenica had told Mother Superior when she’d been summoned into the convent upon the terrible screaming of the little girl. Captain Mirenda herself was on her way to question Domenica Medici about this. She would have no objection to the other policemen attending her.

  Mother Superior spoke one last time before they left her. She murmured, “I did not know. She said it was her duty to prepare the little girl for God.”

  VILLA RIVELLI

  TUSCANY

  Lynley had followed the conversation perfectly well, but he very nearly wished he hadn’t been able to do so. To have managed to track Hadiyyah to this place—for who else could it be but Hadiyyah brought into the Alps?—and to find themselves just hours too late . . . He couldn’t imagine how he was going to tell the girl’s parents. He also couldn’t imagine how he was going to relay the information to Barbara Havers.

  He walked slowly in the wake of the carabinieri officer and Lo Bianco. Captain Mirenda had been told where Domenica Medici was to be found. A short distance from the villa and sheltered from it by a hedge of camellias in bloom, a stone barn stood. Within this barn a woman dressed in garb similar to the Mother Superior’s sat on a low stool milking a goat, her cheek resting on the animal’s flank and her eyes closed.

  Lynley would have thought she was a nun herself, save for the subtle differences in her clothing from the habit worn by the Mother Superior. The essentials of it were the same: a white robe, a simple black veil. Most people, seeing her, would assume she was a member of the cloistered community.

  She was so involved in what she was doing that she wasn’t aware anyone had entered the barn. It was only when Captain Mirenda said her name that her eyes opened. She wasn’t startled by the presence of outsiders. Less was she startled by the fact that one of them wore the uniform of the carabinieri.

  “Ciao, Domenica,” Captain Mirenda said.

  Domenica smiled. She rose from her stool. A gentle slap on the flank of the goat sent it on its way, and it moved to join three others who were gathered at the far end of the barn, near a door the top half of which was open, revealing a fenced paddock beyond it. She brushed her hands down the front of the garment that went for her false nun’s habit. In a gesture reminiscent of cloistered nuns Lynley had seen depicted on television and in films, she buried her hands in the sleeves of this garment, and she stood in an attitude that mixed humility with anticipation.

  Lo Bianco was the one to speak although Captain Mirenda shot him a look that indicated he was out of place to be doing so. The carabinieri had, after all, been the agency of police first on the scene. Courtesy demanded that Lo Bianco allow the other officer to get down to business while he and Lynley observed.

  He said to the young woman, “We have come for the child that your cousin Roberto Squali gave into your keeping, Domenica. What have you done with her?”

  At the question Domenica’s face took on a look of such placidity that for a moment Lynley doubted they’d found the right person. “I have done God’s will,” she murmured.

  Lynley felt the grip of despair. His gaze took in the barn. His thoughts shot from one place to another where the mad young woman could have hidden the body of a nine-year-old girl: somewhere in the woods, somewhere on the grounds, a shadowy corner of the villa itself. They would need to bring in a team to find her unless the woman could be made to speak.

  “What will of God have you done?” Captain Mirenda said.

  “God has forgiven me,” Domenica replied. “My sin wa
s the prayer and the relief in having the prayer granted by Him. Ever since, I have walked the path of penitence to receive His absolution. I have done His will. My soul now magnifies the Lord. My spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” Again her head bowed, as if she’d said all she was going to say on the subject.

  “Your cousin Roberto Squali would have told you to keep the child safe,” Lo Bianco said. “He would not have told you to harm the child. You were to keep her until he came for her. Do you know your cousin Roberto is dead?”

  She frowned. For a moment she said nothing, and Lynley thought that the news alone might loosen her tongue as to the whereabouts of Hadiyyah. But then she said, surprisingly, that it was the will of God that she should have witnessed what happened to Roberto. She, too, had thought her cousin was dead because God had clearly taken his car from the road and sent it soaring into the air. But the ambulanza had come for him and she’d understood from this that patience was required when one sought to understand the greater meanings behind God’s hand in one’s life.

  “Pazza,” Captain Mirenda said tersely. Her voice was low, and if Domenica heard this declaration, she said nothing in reply to it. Slings and arrows couldn’t hurt her now. Obviously, she’d moved to an unearthly realm in which the Almighty had blessed her.

  “You witnessed this accident to your cousin?” Lo Bianco said.

  That, too, was God’s will, Domenica told him.

  “And then you wondered what next to do with the child you were supposed to be keeping for him, vero?” Lo Bianco clarified.

  All that was required was to do God’s will.