Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “Being punished, if one can actually punish a dachshund,” Deborah told him. “She was being far too insistent about having her share of lamb, and she’s been put back into the kitchen.”

  “Poor Peach.”

  “You only say that because you weren’t present to witness her machinations,” St. James told him.

  “We call it ‘love eyes,’” Deborah added. “She casts them upon one and it’s impossible to deny her.”

  Lynley chuckled. He leaned back in his chair and took a final moment to enjoy their company, the day, the simple pleasure of gathering in the garden for lunch. Then he said, “It’s business I’ve come on, actually,” and as Joseph Cotter then rose as if to make himself scarce, Lynley told him to stay if he wished as there was no secret involved in his mission in Chelsea.

  But Cotter said it was time for him to do the washing up. He took a tray from its resting place on the lawn and loaded it efficiently. Deborah helped him, and in a moment she and her father left the two men alone.

  “What sort of business?” St. James asked him.

  “Scientific, actually.” Lynley brought him into the picture regarding the death of Angelina Upman in Italy. He related the details from the phone call Salvatore Lo Bianco had made to him. St. James listened in his usual fashion, his angular face reflective.

  At Lynley’s conclusion, he was silent for a moment before he said, “Could there have been a laboratory error? Having an isolated case of so virulent a strain of bacteria . . . To me, it doesn’t suggest murder as much as it suggests human error in examining what came from the dead woman’s gut. The point at which bacterial involvement is suspected . . . ? That should have happened while she was alive. It’s going to be difficult for Lo Bianco to prove anything, isn’t it? For example, how the E. coli entered her system at all.”

  “I suppose that’s why he wants to begin with the lab. Will you do it for me?”

  “Pay a call at University College? Of course.”

  “Azhar claims his lab’s studying Streptococcus. Lo Bianco’s looking for anything else they might be studying. As for transport . . .” Lynley shifted in his chair. Movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Alaska had dived into the herbaceous border and a furious battle appeared to be going on among a patch of violas. He said, “Could he have transported a bacteria safely from London to Lucca, Simon?”

  St. James nodded. “It merely needs to be put on a medium that allows it to survive, a broth and a solidifier. Onto the solid, one would streak the bacteria. Placed onto a petri dish, it not only would survive but grow.”

  “How much would be needed to kill someone?”

  “That depends, doesn’t it?” St. James said. “Toxicity is the key.”

  “I have the impression from Salvatore that the E. coli we’re seeking is particularly toxic.”

  “I’ll have to be careful, then,” Simon said. He folded his linen table napkin and pushed himself to his feet. He was disabled, so rising was always a rather awkward business for St. James, but Lynley knew better than to offer his assistance.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  When Barbara saw who was ringing her mobile, she ducked into the stairwell to take the call. There were voices echoing up the stairs from somewhere far below, but they disappeared as whoever was climbing left the stairwell for one of the lower floors. She said to Azhar, “How are you? Where are you? What’s happening over there?” and although she tried to keep from her voice the desperate urgency that she was feeling, she could tell from his hesitation prior to responding that he heard it and wondered about it.

  “I have a solicitor,” he told her. “He is called Aldo Greco. I wanted to give you his phone number, Barbara.”

  She had a pencil but no paper, and she searched the floor frantically for something to write on before she had to give in and use the faded yellow wall. She took the number down for later programming into her mobile. She said, “Good. That’s an important step.”

  “He speaks English very well,” Azhar said. “I’m told that it is lucky indeed that I found myself in need of a solicitor while being detained in this part of Italy. I’m told had this . . . this situation occurred in one of the small towns deeply south of Naples, it would be more difficult as a solicitor would have had to be willing to come from a larger city. I do not know why this is the case. It is merely what they told me.”

  Barbara knew he was only making conversation. Her heart cracked a little at the thought that he would have to do this with her, his friend. She said, “What’s the embassy going to do? Have you spoken to anyone there?”

  He said that he had, that it was the embassy who had given him a list of solicitors in Tuscany. But aside from that list, they could do little else for him beyond phoning his relatives, which he hardly wanted them to do. “They say that when a British national gets into difficulties on foreign soil, it’s up to that British national to get himself out of those difficulties.”

  “Nice of them, informing you of that,” Barbara noted sardonically. “I always did wonder what our bloody taxes are going for.”

  “Of course they have other concerns,” he said. “And as they do not know me and only have my word that there is no reason for the police to wish to question me . . . I suppose I can understand.”

  Barbara found she could see him even without his presence. He’d be wearing one of the crisp white shirts he usually wore, she reckoned, along with trousers that were dark and simple. Cut well to fit him, the clothing would inadvertently reveal his slender frame. He’d always looked so delicate, she thought, so insubstantial when compared to other men. His appearance along with how well she knew him—and she knew him well, she told herself—spoke of his essential goodness. Which was, at the end of the day, why she gave him the information he needed in order to prepare himself for what was coming. This wasn’t about her loyalty to anyone, she told herself. This was about basic fairness.

  She said, “Her kidney failure was caused by a toxin, Azhar. Shiga toxin it’s called.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then he said, “What?” as if he hadn’t heard her clearly or, hearing her, couldn’t quite believe what she was telling him.

  “DI Lynley rang the Italian bloke for me. He got the information.”

  “From Chief Inspector Lo Bianco?”

  “That’s the name. This bloke Lo Bianco said that Shiga toxin caused her kidneys to fail.”

  “How is this possible? The strain of E. coli that results in Shiga toxin—”

  “She picked it up somewhere, the E. coli. Apparently a bloody nasty strain of it. The doctors didn’t know what they were dealing with because of her earlier problems with the pregnancy, so they did a few basic tests and when the tests were negative or whatever they gave her a course of antibiotics—”

  “Oh my God,” he murmured.

  Barbara said nothing, and after a moment, he seemed to begin thinking aloud because he went on in a meditative tone with, “This is why he asked me about . . .” And then his voice altered to insistence as he said, “It has to be a mistake, Barbara. For one person alone to die from this? No. Virtually impossible. This is a bacteria, E. coli. It infects a food supply. Someone else would fall ill. Many people would fall ill because they would eat from the same food supply as Angelina. Do you see what I mean? This cannot have happened. There has to be a laboratory error.”

  “As to laboratories, Azhar . . . You see where they’re heading, don’t you? The Italian coppers? With the whole idea of laboratories?”

  He was silent then. The pieces were clicking into place. Or at least that was what Barbara had to believe. He wasn’t speculating in this silence, he wasn’t wondering, and he wasn’t planning his next move. He was merely concluding, completing for himself the chain of events that began with Angelina’s disappearance from London with their daughter in tow and ended with her death in Lucca. />
  He finally said quietly, “Streptococcus, Barbara.”

  “What?”

  “This is what we study in my laboratory at University College: Streptococcus. Some laboratories study more than one bacteria. We do not. We study more than one strain of it, of course. But only strains of Streptococcus. Of personal interest to me is the Strep that causes meningitis in newborn infants.”

  “Azhar. You don’t have to tell me this.”

  “The mother, you see,” he said insistently as if she hadn’t spoken, “passes it to the infant as the baby travels through the birth canal. From this develops—”

  “I believe you, Azhar.”

  “—the infant’s meningitis. We’re seeking a way to prevent this.”

  “I understand.”

  “And there are other forms as well, other forms of Strep that we study in the lab since the graduate students are working on dissertations and the postgraduates are working on papers to be published. But the one I study . . . It is as I said. And of course Angelina was pregnant so they will ask about this, won’t they? How coincidental is it that I would study a bacteria found in pregnant women? And they will wonder as you are wondering because, after all, I arranged the kidnapping of my own child—”

  “Azhar, Azhar.”

  “I did not harm Angelina,” he said. “You cannot think I harmed her.”

  She hadn’t been thinking that. She couldn’t even bring herself close to thinking that. But the truth was that in this entire Italian situation, there was more than one kind of harm, and Azhar knew this as well as Barbara herself. She said, “The kidnapping. Those tickets to Pakistan. You have to see how it’s going to look in conjunction with her death if word gets out.”

  “Only you and I know about these things, Barbara.” His voice was wary.

  “What about Doughty and Smythe?”

  “They work for us,” he said. “We do not work for them. They’ve been instructed . . . You must believe me because if you of all people do not believe . . . I did not harm her. Yes, the kidnapping was a terrible thing to arrange, but how else could she ever be made to experience what it feels like when your child is there one day and gone the next and you have no idea . . . ?”

  “Pakistan, Azhar. One-way tickets. Lynley knows about them. And he’s doing his homework.”

  “You are not thinking,” he cried. “Why would I purchase tickets for July but arrange Angelina’s death in May? Why would I do that when I would have no need of tickets to Pakistan with Angelina dead?”

  Because, Barbara thought, those tickets absolve you of suspicion and I did not see that until this moment because I couldn’t see it until I learned how Angelina Upman died. She said none of this, but her silence seemed to tell Azhar that something more was required of him, if not now then the next time Inspector Lo Bianco wanted to question him.

  He said, “If you think I harmed her, you must ask yourself where I got this bacteria. Of course, someone somewhere in England studies it and perhaps in London but I do not know who. And yes, of course, this is an easy enough thing for me to find out. So I could have found out. But so could anyone else.”

  “I see that, Azhar. But you have to ask how likely it is . . .” And here she paused because she had to consider what she owed: not only to Lynley, to Azhar, to Hadiyyah, but also to herself. She said, “The thing is . . . you lied to me once and—”

  “I do not lie now! And when I did lie . . . How could I tell you what I had planned? Would you have allowed me to go forward and kidnap her? No, you would not. An officer of the police? How could I have expected this of you? It was something that had to be done on my own.”

  As murder is generally done, she thought.

  A silence endured between them, broken finally by Azhar. “Is there nothing you are willing to do to help me now?” he asked.

  “I haven’t said that.”

  “But it’s what you think, isn’t it? ‘I must distance myself from this man because if I do not, it could cost me everything.’”

  Which was, Barbara thought wryly, not that far off from what DI Lynley had told her. Everything was on the line for her unless she could think of a way to get herself one step ahead of the Italian police.

  THE WEST END

  LONDON

  Mitchell Corsico was the way, she decided. Once she programmed the phone number of Azhar’s solicitor into her mobile and rubbed it off the stairwell’s wall, she rang the reporter and said, “We need to meet. Angelina Upman’s dead. Why’d you blokes not pick up on the story?”

  His fire wasn’t lit. “Who says we didn’t pick up on the story?”

  “I sure as hell didn’t see it.”

  “Are you saying I’m responsible for what you see or don’t see in the paper?”

  “Are you saying it was in the paper but it didn’t make front-page news? You are seriously out of the loop, son. We better meet, pronto.”

  He still didn’t bite, the wily bastard. “Tell me why this is front-page news, and I’ll tell you if we need to meet, Barb.”

  She refused to be irritated by the bloke’s arrogance. She said, “Did it even make The Source, Mitchell? A British girl is kidnapped from a crowd of people, then she’s found stowed in a convent in the Italian Alps under the care of a mental case who thinks she’s a nun, then her mother dies unexpectedly. What part of this isn’t the kind of story that’s meat and potatoes to you lot?”

  “Hey, she made page twelve. If she’d done us a favour and offed herself, she’d’ve made page one, but what can I tell you? She didn’t, so she got buried inside.” He guffawed and added, “Pardon the pun.”

  “And what if she actually did you blokes a real page-one favour and died in a way that the powers in Italy want hushed up?”

  “What, are you saying the Prime Minister killed her? What about the Pope?” Another irritating guffaw from the bloke. “She died in hospital, Barb. We got all the facts. She slipped into a coma and she never came out of it. Her kidneys were done for. So what’re you suggesting: that someone tiptoed into her hospital room and put kidney poison in her drip bag?”

  “I’m suggesting you and I need to talk and I’m not prepared to talk till I see your face.”

  She allowed him to dwell on this while she herself feverishly considered which of the many ways possible would be best to spin the story in order to hook The Source. Politically the rag had become so nationalist over the years, it was practically Nazi in its leaning. She decided flag waving was the way to go. Brits versus the Pasta Eaters. But not yet. Not till she had him hooked.

  He finally said, “All right. But this had better be very good, Barb.”

  She said, “It is,” and just to be pleasant, she allowed him to name the place of their meeting.

  He chose Leicester Square, the half-price ticket booth. The real half-price ticket booth, he told her, not some wannabe. There was a fancy notice board next to the real one where tickets on offer for the dramas, comedies, and musicals were announced. He’d meet her there.

  She kept her voice airy. “I’ll wear a rose in my lapel.”

  “Oh, I expect I’ll know you by the sweat of your desperation,” he said.

  They set up a time, and she got there early. Leicester Square was, as usual, a terrorist’s wet dream, with the crowds only getting worse as summer came on. Now there were masses of tourists gathered at open-air restaurants, in front of buskers, buying tickets for the cinema, and attempting to negotiate terms for theatrical productions in need of an audience. By mid-July the masses would have morphed into hordes, and moving through them would be nigh impossible.

  She planted herself in front of the notice board and made a show of studying its offerings. Musicals, musicals, musicals, musicals. Plus Hollywood celebrities trying to be stage actors. Shakespeare was spinning in his grave, she reckoned.

  She was seven and a half minutes
into listening to various debates all round her—what to see, how much to spend, whether Les Miz could possibly run for yet another century or maybe two—when the scent of aftershave worked on her like smelling salts. Mitchell Corsico was at her side.

  She said, “What the bloody hell are you wearing? Essence of horse? Christ, Mitchell.” She waved a hand in front of her face. “Isn’t the get-up enough for you?” How long, she wondered, could one man possibly keep wearing clothes that suggested a bloke on a quest to find Tonto?

  He said, “You wanted this meeting, right? So it needs to be important or I’m not a happy horseman.”

  “How does an Italian cover-up sound?”

  He glanced round. The jostling of people trying to see the notice board was something of a trial, so he moved towards the edge of the square in the direction of Gerrard Street and its one-hundred-yard claim of being London’s Chinatown. Barbara followed. He planted himself squarely in front of her, then, and said, “What’re you talking about? You better not be playing me.”

  “The Italians have the cause of death. They’re not saying officially what it is. They don’t want the papers getting a whiff of it because they don’t want to start a panic. Either among the people or in the economy. Is that enough for you?”

  His gaze shifted from her to a balloon seller to her again. “Could be,” he said. “What’s the cause?”

  “A strain of E. coli. A super strain. A deadly strain. The worst there is.”

  His eyes narrowed. “How d’you know this?”

  “I know it because I know it, Mitchell. I was there when the call came through from the rozzers.”

  “‘Came through’? Where?”

  “DI Lynley. He got the word from the chief investigator in Lucca.”

  Mitchell’s eyebrows locked. He was, she knew, evaluating her words. He wasn’t a fool. Content was one thing. Meaning was another. The fact that she would bring Lynley into anything at all was raising his warning hairs.