Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  When she’d departed, Azhar said, “Non capisco, Ispettore,” and waited for elucidation.

  Salvatore said, “I wonder if you carried with you the understandable anger at this woman for her sins against you.”

  “We all commit sins against each other,” Azhar said. “I have no immunity from this. But I think she and I had forgiven each other. Hadiyyah was—she is—more important than the grievances Angelina and I had.”

  “So you did hold grievances.” And when Azhar nodded, “Yet in your time here, those did not rise between you? You did not accuse? There were no recriminations?”

  Birgit stumbled a bit with the word recriminations. But after a pause to consult a pocket dictionary, she carried on. Azhar said that there had been no recriminations once Angelina understood that he had had nothing to do with their daughter’s disappearance, although it had taken him much to convince her of this, including a call upon his estranged wife and their children as well as proof of his own presence in Berlin at the time of Hadiyyah’s disappearance.

  “Ah, yes, Berlin,” Salvatore said. “A conference, vero?”

  Azhar nodded. A conference of microbiologists, he said.

  “Many of them?”

  Perhaps three hundred, Azhar told him.

  “Tell me, what does a microbiologist do? Forgive my ignorance. We policemen . . . ?” Salvatore smiled regretfully. “Our lives, they are very narrow, you see.” He put a packet of sugar into his caffè. He took another biscotto and let it melt on his tongue like the other.

  Azhar explained, although he didn’t look convinced by Salvatore’s declaration of ignorance. He spoke about the classes he taught, the graduate and postgraduate students he worked with, the studies carried out in his laboratory, and the papers he wrote as a result of those studies. He spoke of conferences and colleagues as well.

  “Dangerous things, these microbes, I would think,” Salvatore said.

  Azhar explained that microbes came in all shapes and sizes and levels of danger. Some, he said, were completely benign.

  “But one does not interest oneself with those that are benign?” Salvatore said.

  “I do not.”

  “Yet to protect yourself from the danger of exposure to them? This must be crucial, eh?”

  “When one works with dangerous microbes, there are many safeguards,” Azhar informed him. “And laboratories are differently designated according to what’s studied within them. Those that have higher biohazard levels have more safeguards built into them.”

  “Sì, sì, capisco. But let me ask: What, really, is the point of studying such dangerous little things as these microbes?”

  “To understand how they mutate,” Azhar said, “to develop a treatment should one be infected by them, to increase the response time when one is trying to locate the source. There are many reasons to study these microbes.”

  “Just as there are many types of microbes, eh?”

  “Many types of microbes,” he agreed. “As vast as the universe and mutating all the time.”

  Salvatore nodded thoughtfully. He poured more caffè into his cup from the crockery jug and held it up to both Birgit and Azhar. Birgit nodded; Azhar shook his head. He tapped his fingers against the tabletop and looked beyond Salvatore towards the door of the room. Hadiyyah’s high, excited chattering came to them. She was speaking Italian. Children, he thought, were so quick to pick up languages.

  “And in your laboratory, Dottore? What is being studied there? And is this laboratory a . . . what did you call it? A biohazard laboratory?”

  “We study the evolutionary genetics of infectious diseases,” he said.

  “Molto complesso,” Salvatore murmured.

  This required no translation. “It is complex indeed,” Azhar said.

  “Do you favour one microbe over another in this biohazard laboratory of yours, Dottore?”

  “Streptococcus,” he said.

  “And what do you do with this Streptococcus?”

  Azhar seemed thoughtful at this. He frowned and once again his eyebrows drew together. He explained his hesitation by saying, “Forgive me. It is difficult to—forgive me—to simplify what we do for a layman’s understanding.”

  “Certo,” Salvatore acknowledged. “Ma provi, Dottore.”

  Azhar did so after another moment of thinking. He said, “Perhaps to make it simple, it’s best to say that we engage in a process that allows us to answer questions about the microbe.”

  “Questions?”

  “About its pathogenesis, emergence, evolution, virulence, transmission . . .” Azhar paused to give Birgit time to work upon the more complicated words in Italian.

  “And the reason for all this?” Salvatore asked. “I mean, the reason for all this in your laboratory?”

  “The studying of mutations and how they affect virulence,” he said.

  “In other words, how the mutation makes the microbe more deadly?”

  “This is correct.”

  “How the mutation makes the microbe more likely to kill?”

  “This is also correct.”

  Salvatore nodded thoughtfully. He observed Azhar at greater length than was called for by their conversation about his work. This obviously told the Pakistani man that something was up and, considering that he had been asked to turn his passport over to the police, what was up was obviously the death of his daughter’s mother and its possible connection to his own work.

  Azhar said with apparent great care, “You are asking me these questions for a reason, Inspector. May I know what it is?”

  Instead of replying in answer, Salvatore asked, “What happens to these microbes of yours if they are transported, Dottore? What I mean is, what happens to them if someone transports them from one place to another?”

  “It depends on how they’re transported,” Azhar said. “But I don’t understand why you ask me this, Inspector Lo Bianco.”

  “So they can indeed be transported?”

  “They can. But again, Inspector, you ask me these questions because—”

  “The kidneys of an otherwise healthy woman fail,” Salvatore cut in. “Obviously, there must be a reason for this.”

  Azhar said nothing at all in reply. He was still as a statue, as if any movement he made would tell a tale he did not wish to be told.

  “So you see, we ask you to remain in Italy for a bit of time,” Salvatore went on. “You would wish, perhaps, to have an English-speaking attorney at this point? You would wish, perhaps, to see to it that little Hadiyyah has someone to care for her in the event—”

  “I will care for Hadiyyah,” Azhar said abruptly. But he sat so stiffly in his chair that Salvatore could imagine every muscle in his body tensing as all the implications behind Salvatore’s questions, his own frank responses, and the advice about an avvocato fell upon him.

  “What I would suggest, Dottore,” Salvatore said carefully, “is your preparation for all possible outcomes to this conversation you and I are having.”

  Azhar rose then. He said quietly, “I must go to my daughter now, Inspector Lo Bianco. I have promised her that we will take flowers to her mother’s grave. I will keep that promise.”

  “As a father should,” Salvatore said.

  CHELSEA

  LONDON

  The glorious May weather made Lynley long for a convertible as he coursed along the river. There were other routes to get to Chelsea from New Scotland Yard, but none of them provided what first Millbank and then Grosvenor Road provided on this day: trees bursting forth with brilliant green leaves still untouched by the city’s dust, dirt, and pollution; the sight of runners taking exercise on the wide pavement that followed the course of the Thames; barges in the water and pleasure craft heading towards Tower Bridge or Hampton Court. Gardens were brilliant with grass renewed and with shrubbery bearing its new spring growth. I
t was a fine day to be alive, he thought. He breathed in life deeply and felt momentarily at peace with his world.

  That had not been the case a few minutes earlier when he’d reported to Superintendent Ardery the phone call he’d received from Salvatore Lo Bianco. Her immediate response was “Christ. This becomes worse and worse, Tommy,” and she’d left her desk and begun to pace her office. On her second circuit of the room, she’d closed the door upon anyone who might wander by.

  The fact that she was in mental disarray was unlike her. Lynley said nothing but merely waited for what was coming next. It was “I need some air and so do you,” to which his admonitory “Isabelle” was met with her sharp “I said air, for God’s sake. Do me the courtesy of taking me at my word until you find me passed out on this floor with a vodka bottle in my hand.”

  He winced at how well she knew him. He said, “Right. Sorry,” and she accepted this with a sharp nod. Then she strode to the door that she’d just closed, and she threw it open. She said to Dorothea Harriman—always lingering nearby to be of assistance or to glean gossip—“I have my mobile,” and she headed in the general direction of the lifts.

  The two of them went outside, where Isabelle stood for a moment in the vicinity of the Met’s revolving sign. She said, “At moments like this, I wish I still smoked.”

  He said, “If you tell me what’s happened, I’ll let you know if I feel the same.”

  “Over there.” She inclined her head towards the junction of Broadway and Victoria Street. A park lay there, its grass shaded by great London plane trees. At a far corner stood a memorial to the suffragette movement, but she didn’t move towards this immense scroll but rather to one of the trees. She leaned against it.

  “So how do you propose to do this without alerting Professor Azhar?” Isabelle asked him. “Obviously, you can’t go yourself. And sending Barbara would be tantamount to shooting yourself in a crucial bodily organ. You do know that, Tommy. At least and by God, I hope you know that.”

  The passion with which she said her last bit told Lynley she’d either been withholding information the last time they’d spoken or she’d received yet another damning report from DI Stewart. It turned out to be the latter.

  She said, “She’s been to see both the private investigator—”

  “Doughty,” he said.

  “Doughty,” she agreed. “And this Bryan Smythe.”

  “But we knew that, Isabelle.”

  “In the company of Taymullah Azhar, Tommy,” Isabelle added. “Why wasn’t this part of her report?”

  He cursed inwardly. This was something new, something more, another brick in the wall, nail in the coffin, whatever on earth one wanted to call it. He said, although he knew the answers as well as he knew his own name, “When did she see him? When did they go? And how did you—”

  “That’s where she was the morning she claimed whatever she claimed—Was it a stop for petrol? Traffic? God, I can’t even remember now—about why she was late to our meeting.”

  “John Stewart again, then? Christ, Isabelle, how much longer are you going to put up with his machinations? Or did you order him, at this point, to start tailing Barbara?”

  “Don’t let’s make this about something other than what it is. And what it is is beginning to look like a cover-up, which as you bloody well know is far more serious than creating a story about her miserable mother falling over a stool or whatever the hell it was supposed to be in her care home.”

  “I’m the first to admit she was out of order doing that.”

  “Oh, let me call on the saints and angels in praise,” Isabelle said. “And now what we have is a set of behaviours on the part of Sergeant Havers that strongly suggest she’s stitching up evidence.”

  “We have no UK crime,” he reminded her.

  “Don’t take me for a fool. She’s over the side, Tommy. You and I both know it. I may have started out investigating arson in my career, but one thing I learned from examining fire scenes is that if my nose is picking up the scent of smoke, there’s bloody well been a fire.”

  He waited for her to tell him the rest, which constituted those airline tickets to Pakistan. Still she did not. He concluded once again that, for whatever little good it did Havers, Isabelle continued not to know about the tickets. Had she known, she would have told him at this point. There was no reason to hold back that information.

  She said to him, “Did you know she’d been to see Smythe and Doughty in the company of Azhar?”

  He looked at her steadily as he formulated his reply: which way to go and what it would mean if he went there. He had hoped she wouldn’t ask the question, but as she said, she wasn’t a fool.

  “Yes,” he told her.

  She looked heavenward, crossing her arms beneath her breasts. “You’re protecting her by stitching up evidence yourself, I take it?”

  “I am not,” he said.

  “So what am I to think . . . ?”

  “That I don’t know everything yet, Isabelle. And until I know it, I saw no reason to worry you.”

  “You mean to protect her, don’t you? No matter the cost. God in heaven, what’s wrong with you, Tommy? This is your bloody career we’re talking about.” And when he didn’t answer, she said, “Never mind. It isn’t, is it? What was I thinking? The earldom awaits. Is that what they call it, by the way, an earldom? And the family pile in Cornwall is always there ready for you to decamp to if you want to throw all of this over. You don’t need to do this kind of work. It’s all a lark for you. It’s a walk in the park. It’s a bloody joke. It’s—”

  “Isabelle, Isabelle.” He took a step towards her.

  She held up her hand. “Don’t.”

  “Then what?” he asked her.

  “Can you not for one moment see where this is heading, for all of us? Can you not look beyond Barbara Havers for a bloody instant and realise the position she’s putting us in? Not only herself, but us as well.”

  He had to see it because, like her, he was not a fool. But he also had to admit to himself that before this moment he hadn’t thought about the impact Barbara’s behaviour would have upon Isabelle herself should all of what she had done come out into the open. Hearing Isabelle’s voice tinged as it was with despair, he felt as if the clouds were parting and where the sun was shining was not, at this moment, upon Barbara. For Isabelle Ardery was in charge of all the officers, and the responsibility for what the members of her squad did and did not do ultimately rested upon her shoulders.

  Cleaning house was what it was generally called in the aftermath of corruption’s coming to light. The rubbish got tossed to appease the public, and Isabelle Ardery stood in very good stead to be part of that rubbish.

  He said to her, “This situation . . . It’s not going to come to that, Isabelle.”

  “Oh, you know that, do you?”

  “Look at me,” he said. And when she finally did so and when he read the fear in her eyes, he said, “I do. I won’t allow you to be damaged. I swear it.”

  “You don’t have that power. No one does.”

  Now as Lynley guided the Healey Elliott into Cheyne Walk, he tried to put his promise to Isabelle from his mind. There were bigger issues even than Barbara’s involvement with Taymullah Azhar, Dwayne Doughty, and Bryan Smythe, and those needed to be dealt with as soon as possible. Still, his heart was heavy as he parked the car near the top of Lawrence Street. He walked the distance back to Lordship Place and went in through the gate that led to a garden he knew as well as he knew his own.

  They were in the last stages of an alfresco lunch beneath a cherry tree in magnificent bloom in the centre of the lawn: his oldest friend, that friend’s wife, and her father. They were watching an enormous grey cat slinking along an herbaceous border thick with lunaria, bellis, and campanula. They were apparently hot into a discussion on the subject of Alaska—said cat—and whether hi
s best mousing days were over.

  When they heard the squeak of the garden gate, they turned. Simon St. James said, “Ah, Tommy. Hullo.”

  Deborah said, “You’re just in time to settle an argument. How are you on the subject of cats?”

  “Nine lives or otherwise?”

  “Otherwise.”

  “Not an expert, I’m afraid.”

  “Damn.”

  Deborah’s father, Joseph Cotter, rose to his feet and said, “Afternoon, m’lord. A coffee?”

  Lynley waved Cotter back to his seat. He fetched another chair from the terrace at the top of the steps that led to the house’s basement kitchen. He joined them at the table and took a look at the remains of their meal. Salad, a dish with green beans and almonds, lamb bones littering their plates, the tail end of a loaf of crusty bread, a bottle of red wine. Cotter had been cooking, obviously. Deborah’s talents were artistic, but her artistry was decidedly minimal in the kitchen. As for St. James . . . If he managed marmite on toast, it was cause for massive celebration.

  “How old is Alaska?” he enquired, preparatory to giving his opinion.

  “Lord, I don’t know,” Deborah said. “I think we got him . . . Was I ten years old, Simon?”

  “He can’t possibly be seventeen,” Lynley said. “How many lives can he have?”

  “I think he’s been through eight of them at least,” St. James told him. He said to his wife, “Perhaps fifteen.”

  “Me or the cat?”

  “The cat, my love.”

  “Then I proclaim his mousing days . . . still ongoing,” Lynley said. He made a hasty benediction over the animal, who was at that moment attacking a fallen leaf with an enthusiasm that suggested he thought it was dinner.

  “There you have it,” Deborah said to her husband. “Tommy knows best.”

  “Having vast experience with felines?” St. James asked.

  “Having vast experience of knowing with whom I ought to agree when paying a social call,” Lynley said. “I had a feeling that Deborah was on the side of mousing. She’s always been an advocate for your animals. Where’s the dog?”