Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  Birgit, however, made a very good point, saying, “Would she know her papà’s handwriting, though? Think of Bianca. Would she know yours? What have you ever written to her other than ‘Love from Papà’ on a birthday card?”

  He inclined his head to indicate that she had a good point.

  “And if it is her papà’s writing, does this not show that the London detective is telling the truth? Her papà writes the card and hands it over—or posts it—to Michelangelo Di Massimo, who takes it from there, hiring Squali to take the child from the mercato because he himself does not wish to be implicated in a public abduction.”

  “All of this is true,” he said. “But at the moment, you see, it is no longer the abduction of the child that interests me.” He shifted his position on the bench so that he could gaze upon his ex-wife. Despite their differences and the regrettable alacrity with which her lust for him had faded away, Birgit had a good mind and clear vision. So he asked her the question he’d come to ask. “The investigation into the kidnapping is, of course, no longer mine to direct. By rights, I should pass along this copy of the card to Nicodemo Triglia, vero? And yet if I do, all matters pertaining to Taymullah Azhar will be taken from me. You see this, no?”

  “What ‘matters’ will be taken from you?” she asked shrewdly.

  He told her of the means of Angelina Upman’s death. He said, “Murder is a larger question than kidnapping. Keeping Nicodemo and—let us face the truth squarely—Piero Fanucci occupied with Michelangelo Di Massimo as their culprit allows me access to the child’s father that I would not have if Nicodemo and Piero knew about this card.”

  “Ah. That alters the situation. I see.” She wiped her hands together as if dismissing every qualm he had about the nature of what he was obliquely suggesting. She said, “I say keep the copy of the card and let Piero Fanucci sink in his own stew.”

  “But to let Michelangelo Di Massimo take all the blame for the kidnapping of the child . . . ,” he murmured.

  “You do not know when this card reached Italy in the first place. You do not even know who sent it. It could be years old and written for another matter entirely—the little girl’s keepsake of her father, per esempio—or it could be something someone came across and saw how it could be used . . . Anything is possible, caro,” she said. And then she quickly altered the endearment to “Salvatore” as colour flooded her cheeks. “And anyway isn’t it time that Piero was taught his lesson? I suggest you allow him to trumpet to the newspapers as much as he would like: ‘Di Massimo’s our man! We have the evidence! Put the stronzo on trial!’ And then, of course, a copy of this card sent on the sly to Di Massimo’s attorney . . . ? You owe Piero nothing. And, as you say, murder is a larger issue than abduction.” She smiled at him. “I tell you: Do your worst, Salvatore. Solve this murder and the abduction and send Fanucci directly to hell.”

  He smiled in turn and winced just a bit at the pain. “You see? This is why I fell in love with you,” he told her.

  “Had it only lasted” was her reply.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Back in his office, at the centre of his desk, Salvatore found a stack of photographs along with a note from the resourceful Ottavia Schwartz. She had managed to have them printed on the sly, and they featured everyone who had attended the funeral and the burial of Angelina Upman.

  “Bruno was there, Salvatore.”

  He looked up. She’d seen him and slipped into his office, closing the door behind her. She blanched at the sight of his face. She said shrewdly, “Il drago?” and made a colourful suggestion as to what il Pubblico Ministero could do to himself. Then she joined Salvatore at the desk and pointed out Daniele Bruno, with his bulbous ears, standing among a group of men consoling Lorenzo Mura. Ottavia unearthed another picture of him, head bent to Lorenzo as they spoke by the gravesite. But the import of this? Salvatore asked her. How could it mean anything more than all of the other mourners who spoke to Lorenzo Mura that day? Like Mura, Bruno was on the city’s squadra di calcio. Was Ottavia suggesting that he alone of the team members had gone to the funeral of Lorenzo Mura’s beloved?

  That had not been the case, of course. The other team members had been there. So had the parents of the children whom Lorenzo Mura coached in private sessions. So had other individuals from the community. So had the Mura and the Upman families.

  It was this last group upon whom Salvatore focused. He brought a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and he gazed upon the face of Angelina Upman’s sister. He’d never seen twins who bore such a remarkable likeness to each other. There was usually something—some tiny detail—that differentiated them, but in the case of Bathsheba Ward, he could not tell what it was. She might have been Angelina Upman sprung to life once more. It was quite astounding, he thought.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  The fact that the wife of one Daniele Bruno was a flight attendant on the regular route between Pisa and London turned out to be a nonstarter, as Lynley had thought it might when he checked into it for Salvatore Lo Bianco. She flew into and out of Gatwick several times a day, but that was an end to it. She never had cause to spend the night. She would do, on the off chance that an extreme flight delay resulted in aircraft being held overnight. But when that occurred—which it had not done in the past twelve months—she stayed with the rest of the flight crew at an airport hotel and left the next morning.

  Lynley reported all this to Salvatore, who agreed that the matter of Daniele Bruno was turning into an unmistakable dead end. He’d seen all the photos of the funeral, he said. Bruno was there, certo, but so was everyone else. “I think he has nothing to do with nothing,” Salvatore said in English.

  Lynley didn’t point out that the double negative resulted in Daniele Bruno being guilty of something, if only of being part of a fantasy from the fractured mind of a drug addict. For they had only the word of Carlo Casparia that Bruno had met Lorenzo Mura alone at the football practice field in the first place. And this word had come after being held without a solicitor’s involvement, after days of interrupted sleep and very little food. Daniele Bruno was a nonstarter, he reckoned, just like his wife.

  But there had to be someone, somewhere, with access to something . . .

  They both knew who that someone probably was.

  St. James’s arrival at New Scotland Yard added little to the mix they had. Lynley met his friend in Reception, and they spoke to each other over morning coffee on the fourth floor.

  It had been easy enough for St. James to visit Azhar’s lab. By virtue of his university background and his reputation as a forensic scientist and expert witness, he had colleagues everywhere. A few phone calls had made a walkthrough of the lab a simple thing to arrange. The excuse was meeting the distinguished professor of microbiology Taymullah Azhar. Since he wasn’t there, the offer made by one of Azhar’s two research technicians to show St. James round the lab was accepted with gratitude. They were fellow scientists after all, were they not?

  The lab was extensive and impressive, St. James told Lynley, but for all intents and purposes the subject of study was indeed various strains of Streptococcus. The focus had to do with mutations of these strains, and the equipment in the lab supported this work.

  “From what I could see, it appears to be a fairly straightforward operation,” St. James said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning what’s there is what one would expect in a lab of its type: fume cupboards, centrifuge, autoclave, refrigerators for storing DNA, sequencers for the DNA data, freezers for bacterial isolates, incubators for bacterial cultures, computers . . . There appear to be two main areas of study going on: the Streptococcus that causes necrotising fasciitis—”

  “Which is?”

  St. James added a packet of sugar to his coffee and stirred it. “Flesh-eating bacteria syndrome,” he said.

  “Good God.”


  “The other is the Streptococcus that causes pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis. They’re both serious strains, obviously, but the second one—it’s called Streptococcus agalactiae—crosses the blood-brain barrier and can be deadly.”

  Lynley thought about this. He said, “Is there a chance someone in the lab could be studying E. coli on the sly?”

  “I suppose anything’s possible, Tommy, but to know for certain you’d need a mole inside the place. Some of the equipment could be used for E. coli cultures, obviously. But the broths for growing each of them would be different, as would the incubators. Strep requires a carbon dioxide incubator. E. coli doesn’t.”

  “Could there be more than one kind in the lab?”

  “More than one kind of incubator? Certainly. At least a dozen people work in the place. One of them may have something brewing that deals with E. coli.”

  “Without Azhar’s knowledge?”

  “I doubt it would be without his knowledge unless someone has a nefarious reason for studying it.”

  They exchanged a long look. St. James finally said, “Ah. It’s a tricky thing, isn’t it?”

  “It is indeed.”

  “He’s a friend of Barbara’s, isn’t he? Certainly, she could have some insight here, Tommy. Perhaps if she were to go to the lab herself and do a bit of delving on a pretext having to do with Azhar . . . ?”

  “That’s not on, I’m afraid.”

  “Can you get a search warrant, then?”

  “If it comes to it, yes.”

  St. James examined Lynley’s expression for a moment before he said, “But you hope it doesn’t come to that, I take it?”

  “I’m not at all sure what I hope any longer” was Lynley’s reply.

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  He would have liked to talk to Barbara about what he’d learned from St. James. She’d been for years his go-to person when he wanted to toss round ideas in the course of an investigation. But it was unlikely that she would say anything, do anything, or admit to anything that might endanger Taymullah Azhar. So he was left to do his thinking alone.

  It had been an excellent means of eliminating Angelina Upman. Once the small matter of no one else’s having been affected by the bacteria had been dealt with in one way or another, the road was clear to declaring her death an unfortunate result of food contamination by a virulent strain of bacteria that generally—if detected soon enough—killed no one. Complications from her pregnancy had prevented the doctors from realising what they were dealing with. As did Angelina’s own reluctance to stay in hospital once she finally took herself there. As did the fact that no one else who shared meals with her and no one else in Tuscany, for that matter, turned up in hospital with the same symptoms.

  Someone must have seen how everything was going to play out, Lynley thought. That suggested Lorenzo Mura, but as to why he would wish to harm the woman who was carrying his child, the woman he loved and fully intended to marry . . . Unless, of course, all of his devotion was a front for something else.

  He thought back over every encounter he’d had with the man. He could see the many ways in which Lorenzo had had the opportunity to mix the bacteria into Angelina’s food—the man was, after all, solicitous of her condition because of the pregnancy—but he couldn’t come up with how he’d got the stuff in the first place . . . until he remembered the man he’d seen at the fattoria when he’d first called there.

  What had Lynley seen? A thick envelope handed from this unnamed man to Lorenzo Mura. What had Lorenzo declared? It was payment for one of the donkey foals he raised on the premises.

  But what if that man had brought something other than money? Any possibility was one worth pursuing. Lynley picked up the phone and rang Salvatore Lo Bianco.

  He had much to tell him anyway: He began with St. James’s visit to Taymullah Azhar’s lab, and he ended with the mystery man handing over an envelope to Lorenzo Mura at Fattoria di Santa Zita.

  “Mura claimed it was cash for one of his foals. I thought nothing of it at the time, but if there’s actually no E. coli in Taymullah Azhar’s laboratory in London—”

  “There is no E. coli now,” Salvatore replied. “But he would, of course, have no need of it now, would he, Ispettore?”

  “I see that. He’d have had to be rid of whatever was left—if indeed there was any left—when he returned to London, having already managed to get Angelina to ingest whatever he’d taken to Italy. But here’s something else to consider, Salvatore. What if Angelina was not the intended victim?”

  “Who, then?” Salvatore asked.

  “Perhaps Azhar?”

  “How was he to ingest this E. coli?”

  “If Mura gave him something . . . ?”

  “That he gave no one else? How would that have looked, my friend? ‘Eat this panino, signore, because you look hungry’? Or ‘Try this especial salsa di pomodoro on your pasta’? And how did he put his hands on E. coli? And if he put his hands on it, how would he poison the professor but have no one else affected?”

  “I think we must find the man with the donkeys,” Lynley said.

  “Who does what? Brew E. coli in his bathtub? Notice it crawling round the droppings of a cow or two? My friend, you try to bend what you’ve seen to fit what you hope. You forget Berlin.”

  “What about it?”

  “The conference that our microbiologist attended there. What was to prevent someone passing along to him a bit of this bacteria at the conference?”

  “That was in April. She died weeks later.”

  “Sì, but he has a lab, does he not? He keeps it there . . . however it is kept: warm, cold, boiling, freezing. I do not know. He labels it as something, I do not know what. But as you say, he is the head of this lab so no one is likely to bother anything labelled with the professor’s own writing. When it comes time to use it, he takes it with him to Italy.”

  “But this presupposes he knew everything from the first: that Hadiyyah would be kidnapped, that Angelina would come in search of her, that he himself would go to Italy . . . If he’d been wrong about anything—especially about any move made by any of the principals—the plan would have crumbled.”

  “As it has done, no?”

  Lynley had to admit there was truth in this. He asked Salvatore what was next, although he had a feeling he already knew.

  “I will pay a call upon the good professor. And in the meantime, I will have officers look into the work of all the people who attended that April conference in Berlin.”

  LUCCA

  ITALY

  Salvatore decided not to have Taymullah Azhar come to the questura. He knew how quickly word would filter back to Piero Fanucci that he had done this. And while a conversation with the London professor had not been forbidden to him, he wanted any reports of what he did to go nowhere until he had more information. Once he’d directed Ottavia and Giorgio to look into the attendees at the Berlin conference, he set off for the anfiteatro. On his way, he phoned the London professor and told him in his very bad English to phone his avvocato.

  They were waiting for him in the breakfast room of the pensione when Salvatore arrived. He asked where the child was. Had she gone back to Scuola Dante Alighieri?

  She had not, he was told. After all, Azhar was anticipating a quick end to whatever matter had caused Salvatore to request his passport. Once clarity had been reached in this matter, they would depart as soon as they could. Sending her to school . . . ? This did not seem a reasonable idea since they would be leaving Italy so shortly.

  Salvatore suggested two things at that point. The first was that adequate care for Hadiyyah needed to be arranged. The second was that he look closely at what Salvatore was about to show him.

  He passed to the professor and his avvocato the copy of the card from Villa Rivelli. He watched closely as Azhar’s gaze fell upon it. There was no
thing on his face. He turned the paper over to see if anything was written on the back of it, which Salvatore well recognised as a stalling tactic that gave him time to develop an explanation.

  He said, “And so, Dottore?” to Azhar and waited for Aldo Greco’s translation of what the London man would say. Aldo shifted his buttocks, grimaced, passed gas, pardoned himself, and took up the document for an examination. He read it and handed it back to Azhar. Before Azhar could speak, Greco asked what this thing was and how Salvatore had come by it.

  Salvatore had no problem with revealing either bit of information. It was a copy of a greeting card, he said. It had been found at the location where Hadiyyah Upman had been held after her abduction.

  The card itself or the copy? Greco asked shrewdly.

  The card, of course, Salvatore told him, which was still in the hands of the carabinieri who’d been called to Villa Rivelli by the Mother Superior. In due time the original would be sent to be included with any other gathered evidence.

  “Do you recognise this, Dottore? It appears to be in your handwriting.”

  Aldo Greco intervened at once. He said, “A handwriting expert has confirmed that, Ispettore? Surely you yourself are no expert in such a matter.”

  Salvatore said that, certo, an expert would be employed by the police if things came to that. He himself was there merely to ascertain the provenance of this greeting card.

  “Con permesso?” Salvatore concluded. He indicated with a nod at Azhar that he would be delighted to hear the London man’s reply should his avvocato deem such a thing a reasonable request.

  Signor Greco said to Azhar, “Go ahead, Professore.”

  Azhar said that he did not recognise the card or the message upon it. As to the handwriting . . . It looked similar to his own, he said, but handwriting could be copied by someone with the expertise to do so.