Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  Captain Mirenda’s expression said that she wished God’s will to be that she herself should throttle the young woman. Lo Bianco’s looked only marginally different. Lynley said to Domenica, “What was God’s will?”

  “Abraham,” she told him. “Deliver your beloved son to God.”

  “But Isaac did not die,” Lo Bianco said.

  “God sent an angel to stop the sword from falling,” Domenica said. “One only has to wait for God. God will always speak if the soul is pure. This, too, I prayed to know: how to purify and ready the soul for God so that the state of grace we all seek to be in at the moment of death could be acquired.”

  The moment of death was enough to spur Lo Bianco to action. He went to the young woman, grasped her arm, and said, “God’s will is this,” in a voice that boomed in the stone walls of the place. “You will take us to this child at once, wherever she is. God would not have sent us into the Alps to find her if God did not intend her to be found. You understand this, sì? You understand how God works? We must have that child. God has sent us for her.”

  Lynley thought the young woman might protest, but she did not. She also did not appear cowed by the demand or its ferocity. Instead, she said, “Certo,” and seemed happy to comply. She headed for the great doors of the barn.

  Once outside she went to a stairway that climbed to a door on the barn’s south side. The others followed her up these stairs and into a dimly lit kitchen, where the sight of fresh, bright vegetables in an ancient stone sink and the fragrance of newly baked bread acted as a mocking contrast to what they understood they were about to find in this place.

  She approached a door on the far side of the room, and from her pocket she withdrew a key. Lynley girded himself for whatever was behind the door, and when she said, “The waters of God washed away her sins, and her purity made her ready for Him,” he saw Captain Mirenda cross herself and he heard Lo Bianco give a quiet curse.

  Domenica didn’t cross the threshold of the room beyond the door. Instead, she welcomed them to do so. They hesitated, and Domenica smiled. “Andate,” she urged them, as if eager for them to see what God’s handmaiden had done in the name of Abraham.

  “Dio mio” was Lo Bianco’s murmur as he passed the young woman and entered the room.

  Lynley followed him, but Captain Mirenda did not. She would, he knew, want to prevent Domenica Medici from fleeing the scene. But Domenica made no move to do so. Instead, as the two men entered a small chamber furnished with only a narrow bed, a small chest of drawers, and a prie-dieu, she said, “Vuole suo padre,” and the little girl cowering in the corner of the room repeated this declaration in English.

  “I want my dad,” Hadiyyah said to them. She began to cry in great heaving sobs. “Please can you take me to my dad?”

  VILLA RIVELLI

  TUSCANY

  Salvatore allowed DI Lynley to carry the little girl from the place. She was gowned in white from head to toe, like a child dressed for a Christmas pageant, and she clung to him, burying her face in his neck.

  The Englishman had crossed the room to her in three steps. He’d said, “Hadiyyah, I’m Thomas Lynley. Barbara has sent me to find you,” and she’d held out her arms like a much younger child, trust established at once by his use of English and by the mention of this name. Salvatore did not know who this person was, this Barbara. But if it served to comfort the child in some way to hear her name spoken, he was more than happy to have Lynley invoke it.

  “Where is he? Where’s my dad?” the child wailed.

  Lynley picked her up, and she clung to him, thin legs round his waist, thin arms round his shoulders. “Barbara’s in London waiting for you,” he told the child. “Your father’s in Lucca. Shall I take you to him? Would you like that?”

  “But that’s what he said . . .” And she cried anew, somehow not comforted by the idea of being taken to her father but rather terrified anew in some way.

  Lynley carried her outside and down the stone steps. At their bottom a rustic table and four chairs stood in a square of bright sunlight. He set the girl on one of these chairs and drew a second chair close to her. Gently, he smoothed her chestnut hair, saying, “What did he say to you, Hadiyyah? Who?”

  “The man said he’d take me to my dad,” she told him. “I want my dad. I want Mummy. She put me in water. I didn’t want it and I tried to stop her but I couldn’t and then she locked me up and . . .” She wept and wept. “I wasn’t scared at first ’cause he said my dad . . . But she made me go into the cellar . . .”

  The story came in fits and starts and from it Salvatore picked up snatches and the rest was translated by Lynley as the little girl spoke, telling the tale of what in her confused mind Domenica Medici had determined to be the will of God. A visit to the cellar clarified matters further, for deep within the labyrinthine shadowy place was an ancient marble bathing pool in which disturbingly green and cloudy water had waited for the immersion of a frightened child, baptising her and washing away whatever “sins” stained her soul and made her less pleasing to the sight of God. Once she’d been thus baptised, locking her away was the only manner in which her keeper Domenica could assure her continued purity while she herself awaited the next sign from God to tell her what to do with the child.

  When Salvatore saw the place to which Domenica Medici had dragged the little English girl, he understood the screaming that had brought the carabinieri to the convent. For the vast and vaulted cellar of the Villa Rivelli would be a place of nightmares for any child, with one crypt-like chamber giving onto another, with looming dusty disused wine barrels the size of military tanks in rows, with ancient olive presses looking like instruments of torture . . . It was no wonder that Hadiyyah had screamed in terror. There was more than a good chance that she would wake up screaming from her dreams for a very long time to come.

  It was time to get her out of this place and back to her parents. He said to Lynley, “Dobbiamo portarla a Lucca all’ospedale,” for Hadiyyah would have to be examined by a doctor and spoken to by a specialist in childhood trauma if one could be found whose English was adequate.

  “Sì, sì,” Lynley agreed. He suggested that they phone the parents and have them meet them there.

  Salvatore nodded. He would make that call once he spoke to Captain Mirenda. The carabinieri would, for the present, take charge of Domenica Medici. He doubted they would get much more from the young woman than they’d got already, but she had to be dealt with. She didn’t seem to be an accomplice so much as an instrument of her cousin Roberto Squali. But buried within the confusion of her mind could be something that would tell them more about the commission of the crime. She, too, would need to be examined by a doctor. This doctor, however, would be one of the mind so that an assessment could be made of her.

  “Andiamo,” Salvatore said to Lynley. Once these things were accomplished, their work here was finished and whatever details Hadiyyah herself might be able to provide about her kidnapping, those could wait until she’d been seen to at the hospital and until she was reunited with her parents.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  It wasn’t as difficult as it had used to be, getting an officer from Special Branch to talk. Time was when the blokes from SO12 were a deeply secretive lot, not only closemouthed but also nervy. They had trusted no one, and who could blame them? In the days of the IRA and bombs on buses, in cars, and in rubbish bins, pretty much everyone looked Irish to them, so it didn’t matter if a questioner happened to be from another branch of the Met. The SO12 blokes were tight-lipped and all the et ceteras. Prying information out of them generally took a court order.

  They were still careful, but sharing information was sometimes necessary in these days of fiery clerics in English mosques exhorting their listeners to jihad, British-born young men schooled in the beauties of martyrdom, and professionals from unexpected fields like medicine deciding to alter the course o
f their lives by wiring their cars with explosives and planting them where they would do the most harm. No one could afford unsafe convictions in any of these matters, so if one agency within the Met needed information from another agency within the Met, it wasn’t impossible to find someone who could impart a few details if a name was given.

  Barbara got inside to talk to Chief Inspector Harry Streener by using the magic words Pakistani national living in London and a developing situation in Italy. The bloke had the accent of someone who should have been whistling commands to his sheepdog in the hills of Yorkshire and the pasty cue-ball complexion of a poor sod who hadn’t seen the sun for the past ten years. His fingers were yellow from nicotine and his teeth weren’t much better, and when she saw him, Barbara made a mental note that giving up smoking wasn’t an entirely bad idea. But she set this aside for future consideration and gave him the name she was loath to give him.

  “Taymullah Azhar?” Streener repeated. They were in his office, where an iPod in a docking station was playing something that sounded like hurricane-force winds in a bamboo grove. Streener saw her glance in its direction. “White noise,” he said. “Helps me to think.”

  “Got it,” she said with a wise nod. It would have driven her to the nearest Underground station for shelter, but everyone’s boat floated on different water.

  Streener tapped at his computer’s keyboard. After a moment, he read the screen. Barbara itched to get out of her seat, crawl over his desk, and have at the information, but she forced herself to wait patiently for whatever it was that Streener decided to impart. She’d already sketched in the facts for him: Azhar’s employment at University College London, his entanglement with Angelina Upman, their production of a child together, Angelina’s flight with Hadiyyah to destinations unknown, and Hadiyyah’s disappearance via kidnapping. Streener had listened to all this with a face so impassive that Barbara wondered if he was actually hearing her. At the end of her recitation, she’d said, “Superintendent Ardery’s put me onto the London end of things while DI Lynley’s working the Italian end. I thought it best to check with you lot and see if you’ve been having a look at the bloke.”

  “And your thought as to why SO12 would be onto this . . . What was the name again?” Streener said.

  Barbara spelled it out for him. “Just seemed like an i that needed to be dotted,” she told him. After a moment, she added, “Pakistan? You know what I mean. I don’t have to be PC with you, do I?”

  Streener guffawed. The last thing cops needed to be was politically correct with each other. He typed a bit. Then he read. His lips formed a whistle that he didn’t make. He nodded and said, “Yeah. He’s here. Ticket to Lahore triggered the usual alarms. One-way ticket upped the noise.”

  Barbara felt her gut clench. “C’n you tell me . . . Were you looking at him before the one-way ticket?”

  Streener glanced at her sharply. She’d tried to keep her voice intrigued by this development but not involved other than as a professional doing a job. He seemed to evaluate her question and what it might imply. He finally looked back at his screen, scrolled a bit, and said slowly, “Yes, it appears that we were.”

  “C’n you tell me why?”

  “It’s the job,” he said.

  “I know it’s your job, but—”

  “Not mine. His. Professor of microbiology? He has his own lab? You can fill in the blanks there, can’t you?”

  She could indeed. As a professor of microbiology, as a professional with his own lab . . . God only knew what tasty weapon of mass destruction he could be cooking up. As she herself had said, the magic words were Pakistani national living in London. Pakistani meant Muslim. Muslim meant suspicious. Put one and one together among this lot in SO12, and you came up with three every time. It wasn’t fair but there you had it.

  She couldn’t really blame them. To them, Taymullah Azhar was just a name just as, to them, terrorists were hiding in every garden shed. The job of SO12 was to make sure those blokes didn’t emerge from those sheds with bombs inside their shorts or, in the case of Azhar, with a Thermos filled with God only knew what, sufficient to contaminate the water supply of London.

  She said, “Have you blokes been following the kidnap situation, then?”

  Streener looked some more, then nodded slowly. “Italy,” he said. “He landed in Pisa.”

  “Any indication that Azhar’s contacted an Italian there? Michelangelo Di Massimo would be the name.”

  Streener shook his head, his eyes on the computer’s screen. “Doesn’t seem to be, but this goes back forever. Let me try . . .” He typed. He was fast, using only two fingers but getting the job done. There was nothing on a Michelangelo Di Massimo, he reported. There was nothing, in fact, in Italy at all aside from his landing in Pisa and the name and location of his B & B.

  Thank God was Barbara’s thought when she heard this. Whatever the tickets to Pakistan meant, in this one matter Azhar was clean.

  She’d taken notes throughout, and now she flipped her notebook closed. She made her thanks to Streener and got herself out of his office and into the nearest stairwell, where she lit a fag and took five deep drags. A door opened some floors below her and voices floated upward as someone began climbing. Hastily, she crushed the fag out, put the dog end in her bag, and ducked back into the corridor, where she was making for the lifts when her mobile rang.

  “Page five, Barb,” Mitchell Corsico said.

  “Page five what?”

  “That’s where you’ll find yourself and the Love Rat Dad. I tried for page one, but while Rod Aronson—that’s my editor, by the way—liked this new twist of the Love Rat Dad having it off with an officer from the Met, he wasn’t exactly impassioned by it since there’s nothing fresh on the kid’s disappearance that I c’n give him from over here. So he’s putting it inside. Page five. You got lucky this time.”

  “Mitchell, why the hell are you doing this?”

  “We had an agreement. Quarter of an hour. That was . . . how many hours ago exactly?”

  “It might interest you that I’m working, Mitchell. It might interest you to know that I’m about to break this case wide open. It might be a grand idea for you to stay on my good side because when the story’s ready for—”

  “You should have told me, Barb.”

  “I don’t report to you, in case you haven’t noticed. I report to my guv.”

  “You should have given me something. That’s how this game is played. And you know that. If you didn’t want to play, you shouldn’t have climbed into my sandbox. D’you understand?”

  “I’m going to give you . . .” The lift arrived. It was filled to capacity. She couldn’t continue the conversation. She said, “We c’n sort this out. Just tell me that there’re no dates involved, and we’re back in business.”

  “On the pictures, you mean? Are the dates removed from the pictures?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “And can I guess why that’s important to you?”

  “Oh, I expect you can work that one out. Are you going to answer me?”

  There was a moment. She was in the lift and the doors were closing and she was in terror that either he wouldn’t reply or they’d be cut off.

  But he finally said, “No dates, Barb. I gave you that much. We’ll call it a sign of good faith.”

  “Right,” she said as she rang off. They would definitely call it something.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Hadiyyah wanted Lynley to sit in the back seat of the police car with her, and he was happy to oblige. Lo Bianco phoned ahead to the hospital in Lucca, and he then notified Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar that Hadiyyah had been found at a Dominican convent in the Apuan Alps, that she was alive and well, and that she would be at the hospital within ninety minutes for a general exam. If they would be so good as to meet DI Lynley and himself at this location . . .
?

  “Niente, niente,” he murmured into the mobile, an apparent brushing off of copious expressions of gratitude from the other end. “È il mio lavoro, Signora.”

  In the back seat, Lynley kept Hadiyyah tucked next to him, which seemed to be her preference. Considering the length of time that she’d been held at Villa Rivelli, she did not appear to be the worse for the experience, at least superficially. Sister Domenica Giustina, as Hadiyyah called Domenica Medici, had taken good care of her. Up until the last few days, the child had apparently had the run of the villa’s grounds. It was only in the end that she had become frightened, Hadiyyah said. It was only when Sister Domenica Giustina took her into the cellar to that mouldy, smelly, creepy chamber with the slippery and slimy marble pool in the floor that she had known the slightest bit of terror.

  “You’re a very brave girl,” Lynley said to her. “Most girls your age—most boys as well—would have been frightened from the very start. Why weren’t you, Hadiyyah? Can you tell me? Do you remember how all of this began? What can you tell me?”

  She looked up at him. He was struck by how pretty a child she was, everything attractive in both of her parents blending together to form her innocent beauty. Her delicate eyebrows knotted as she heard his questions, though. Her eyes filled with tears, possibly at the realisation that she might well have done something wrong. Every child knew the rules, after all: Don’t go anywhere with a stranger, no matter what that stranger says to you. And both he and Hadiyyah knew that that was what she had done. He said quietly, “There’s no right or wrong here, by the way. There’s just what happened. You know I’m a policeman, of course, and I hope you know that Barbara and I are very good friends, yes?”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “Brilliant. My job is to find out what happened. That’s it. Nothing else. Can you help me, Hadiyyah?”

  She looked down at her lap, “He said my dad was waiting for me. I was in the market with Lorenzo and I was watching the accordion man near the porta and he said ‘Hadiyyah, this is from your father. He is waiting to see you beyond the city wall.’”