Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  At first, all seemed well. She noted Barbara’s duffel, smiled, and beckoned her inside. She led her into a dimly lit—and, praise God, cooler—corridor, where, on a narrow table, a candle flickered at the feet of a statue of the Virgin and a door opened into what looked like a breakfast room. She gestured that Barbara was meant to place her duffel on the tiled floor, and from a drawer in the table, she brought out a card that looked like something one was meant to fill out in order to stay in the pensione. Fine and dandy, Barbara thought, taking the card and the offered Biro. Sod you, Mitchell. There wasn’t going to be a problem at all.

  She filled the card out and handed it over, and when the woman said, “E il Suo passaporto, signora?” Barbara handed it over as well. She was a little concerned when the woman walked off with it, but she didn’t take it far—just to a buffet inside the breakfast room—and when she rattled off a few sentences in an incomprehensible lingo that Barbara reckoned was Italian, it seemed as if what she was saying was something along the lines of needing the passport for a bit of time in order to do something with it, which Barbara could only hope was not sell it on the black market.

  The woman then said, “Mi segua, signora,” with a smile, and hoisted her child higher on her hip. She headed towards a stairway and began to climb, and Barbara reckoned she was meant to follow. This was all well and good, but there were questions she needed to ask before she got herself established in this place. So she said, “Hang on just a minute, okay?” and when the woman turned to her with a quizzical expression, she went on with, “Taymullah Azhar is still here, right? With his daughter? Little girl about this tall with long dark hair? First thing I need to do—well, aside from having a wash—is to speak to Azhar about Hadiyyah. That’s the little girl’s name. But you probably know that, right?”

  What these remarks did was unleash in the woman a veritable flood. She came back down the stairs firing on all linguistic cylinders. None of them, however, were distinguishable to Barbara.

  Immediately morphing into the metaphorical deer illuminated by an oncoming car’s headlights, Barbara stared at the woman. All she could pick out from the inundation of language was non, non, non. From this, she worked out that neither Azhar nor Hadiyyah was in the pensione. Whether they were permanently gone she couldn’t tell.

  Whatever her recitation meant, the woman was agitated enough to prompt Barbara to dig her mobile phone from her bag and hold it up, if only to silence her. She punched in Azhar’s number but got no joy from that once again. Wherever he was, he still wasn’t answering.

  The woman said, “Mi segua, mi segua, signora. Vuole una camera, sì?” She pointed up the stairs, from which Barbara took it that camera meant room in Italian and not an instrument of photography. She nodded and heaved her duffel off the floor. She trudged behind her hostess up two flights of stairs.

  The room was clean and simple. Not an en suite, but what would one expect in a pensione? She got herself established in shorter order than she had previously intended—a cool shower would obviously have to wait—and she scrolled through her mobile’s address book to find the phone number of Aldo Greco.

  Luckily, his secretary’s English was as good as Greco’s. The solicitor wasn’t in his office at present, Barbara was told, but if she left her number . . .

  Barbara explained. She was trying to locate Taymullah Azhar, she said. She was a friend from London now here in Lucca, and she had come because for the past two days she’d been unable to reach Azhar by phone. She was dead concerned about him and, more to the point, about Hadiyyah, his daughter, and—

  “Ah,” the secretary said. “Let me have Signor Greco phone you at once.”

  Barbara wasn’t sure what at once meant when it came to Italy, so after she gave her number and rang off, she began to pace the room. She opened the shutters on the windows, then the windows themselves. Across the piazza, she saw Mitch Corsico seated at a café table beneath an umbrella, enjoying a drink of some kind. He seemed perfectly relaxed and perfectly content. He knew something, she reckoned, and he was waiting for her to learn it for herself.

  This she did in short order. Her mobile rang and she snatched it up, barking into it. It was Greco.

  Taymullah Azhar had been arrested, he told her, for the crime of murder. He’d been at the questura for the past two days, in and out and off and on, with the arrest coming at half past nine this morning.

  God in heaven, Barbara thought. “Where’s Hadiyyah?” she demanded. “What’s happened to Hadiyyah?”

  In answer, Aldo Greco said that he would meet her at his office in forty-five minutes.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  She had no choice. She had to take Corsico. He knew his way round Lucca, and even if she set off without him, he would only follow her. So when she left Pensione Giardino, she crossed the piazza to him, sat, picked up his glass, and drained it. The drink was something very sweet poured over two cubes of ice. Limoncello and soda, he said. “Go easy with that, Barb.”

  Advice given too late. It hit her directly between the eyes. Her vision felt impaired by a sudden haze. She said, “Bloody hell. No wonder the vita is so dolce in this country. That’s what they do for elevenses?”

  “’Course not,” he said. “They’re easier about life, but they’re not insane. I take it you got the word about Azhar?”

  She felt her eyes narrow. “You knew?”

  He lifted his shoulders in mock regret.

  “Goddamn it, I thought we were working together.”

  “So did I,” he said. “But then . . . when it came down to it . . . on the matter of interviews . . .”

  “Christ. All right. So where’s Hadiyyah, then? Do you know that as well?”

  He shook his head. “But it’s not like there’re dozens of possibilities. They’ve got rules to follow, and I expect none of them say nine-year-olds are left on their own to book themselves into the Ritz when their daddies get charged with murder. We need to find her, though. The sooner the better as I’ve a deadline to meet.”

  Barbara flinched at the callous nature of the remark. Hadiyyah was nothing to Corsico, just another angle to the story he planned to write. She got to her feet, experienced a moment of dizziness from the drink, and waited for it to pass. She scored a handful of crisps from a basket on the table and said, “We’re heading to Via San Giorgio. Know where that is?”

  He threw some coins into the otherwise empty ashtray and got to his feet. “Not far,” he told her. “This is Lucca.”

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Aldo Greco turned out to be a courtly-looking man along the lines of his fellow Lucchese Giacomo Puccini but without the moustache. He had the same soulful eyes and the same thick dark hair touched at the temples with silver strands. His olive skin bore not a single crease. He could have been anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. He looked like a film star.

  Barbara could tell he thought that she and Mitch Corsico were a very odd match, but he was too polite to make any comment aside from Piacere—whatever the hell that meant—when she introduced herself and her companion to the solicitor.

  Greco asked them to sit and offered them refreshments. Barbara demurred. Mitch said a coffee wouldn’t go down half bad. Greco nodded and asked his secretary to see to this, which she did efficiently. Mitchell was presented with a thimble of liquid so black it might have been used motor oil. He was apparently familiar with this, Barbara thought, because he put a sugar cube between his teeth and tossed the mess back.

  Greco was guarded with them once they’d covered the bases of general courtesy. He had no real idea who Barbara was, after all. She could have been anyone—to whit, she could have been a journalist—claiming to know Azhar. Azhar had not mentioned her to the solicitor, and this presented a problem for Greco, who was bound by ethics and probably otherwise loath to give out even the most superficial detail associated with his client�
��s arrest.

  She showed him her police ID. This impressed him only marginally. She mentioned DI Lynley, who’d preceded her to town as liaison officer in the matter of Hadiyyah’s kidnapping, but this achieved a solemn nod and nothing else. She finally remembered that tucked inside her purse was a school photo of Hadiyyah that the little girl had given to her at the start of Michaelmas term back in London. On the back of it she’d written Barbara’s name, Friends 4ever, her own name, and a line of x’s and o’s. Barbara said, “When I heard that Azhar was in and out of the questura, I knew I had to come because Hadiyyah has no relatives in Italy. And her mum’s family in England . . . Well, Angelina was estranged from them. What I was thinking is that if anything more happened . . . I mean, she’s been through hell, hasn’t she?”

  Greco examined the photo Barbara had handed him. He didn’t look convinced till she hit upon her mobile phone. Upon it, she found an old message from Azhar, thankfully undeleted. She handed the mobile over to the solicitor, who listened and finally seemed convinced enough of her friendship with the man to give her the barest of details.

  She would understand, would she not?, that his client had not authorised him to speak to her and therefore certain limits had to apply to what he said. Yes, yes, Barbara told him, and she prayed that Corsico had the good sense not to pull a reporter’s notebook from the pocket of his trousers and start scribbling in it.

  First, Greco told her, Hadiyyah had been returned to Fattoria di Santa Zita, the home of Lorenzo Mura, where she had been living with her mother prior to her mother’s death. This was not a permanent arrangement, naturally. Her relatives in London had been notified by Mura of the child’s father’s arrest. Were they on their way to fetch her? Barbara asked. If that was the case, she told herself, time was of the essence, for if the Upmans got their hands on Hadiyyah, they would make sure, purely out of spite, that Azhar never saw her again.

  “This I do not know,” Greco said. “The police made the arrangements to deliver her to Signor Mura. I did not.”

  “Azhar wouldn’t have given the coppers the name of any Upman to fetch Hadiyyah,” Barbara told the solicitor. “He would have given them my name.”

  Greco looked thoughtful as he nodded. “This could be the case, certo,” he said. “But the police would want a blood relative of the little girl to come for her, as there is no evidence that the professor is actually her father. You see the difficulty in fulfilling whatever desires he might have in the matter, no?”

  What Barbara saw was that she needed to know where Fattoria di Santa Zita was. She glanced at Mitchell. He had his reporter’s face on: perfectly blank. She knew this meant he was committing everything to memory. There might be a benefit to having him on her team.

  She said, “What’s the evidence against him? There has to be evidence. I mean, if someone’s come up with the charge of murder, they have to list the evidence, don’t they?”

  “In due course,” Greco said. He steepled his fingers in front of his chest and used them a bit as a pointer as he explained to her how the justice system worked in Italy. Thus far, Taymullah Azhar was indagato, his name entered into the judicial records as a suspect. He’d been served with the paperwork that indicated this—“We call this avviso di garanzia,” Greco said—and the details of the charges had yet to be revealed. They would be in time, certo, but for the moment an order of segreto investigativo prevented their revelation. At this point, only carefully placed leaks in the newspapers were providing information.

  Barbara listened to this and at the end of it said, “But you must know something, Mr. Greco.”

  “As of now, I know only that there is concern about a conference that the professor attended in April. There is also concern about his profession. At this conference were microbiologists from around the world—”

  “I know about the conference.”

  “Then you will see how it looks that Professore Azhar attended. And then, shortly thereafter his child’s mother died from an organism that could have been obtained—”

  “No one can think Azhar traipsed round Europe with a petri dish of E. coli hidden in his armpit.”

  “Please?” Greco looked confused.

  “The armpit bit,” Mitchell Corsico murmured.

  Barbara said, “Sorry. What I mean is that the entire scenario—how this was supposed to play out?—it’s stupid. Not to mention so unlikely that . . . Look. I need to get in to talk to this copper. Lo Bianco. That’s who it is, right? You c’n arrange for me to see him, can’t you? I work with DI Lynley in London, and Lo Bianco will know his name. He doesn’t need to know I’m a family friend. Just tell him I work with Lynley.”

  “I can make a phone call,” Greco told her. “But he speaks virtually no English.”

  “No problem,” Barbara said. “You c’n go with me, can’t you?”

  “Sì, sì,” he said. “I could do this. But you must consider that Ispettore Lo Bianco is not likely to speak to you frankly if I am present. And I assume you wish him to speak frankly, no?”

  “Right. Of course. But, bloody hell, doesn’t he have to tell you—”

  “Things are different here, signora—” He stopped and corrected himself with “Scusi. Sergeant. Things are different here when an investigation is ongoing.”

  “But when there’s an arrest . . .”

  “It is much the same.”

  “Bloody hell, Mr. Greco, this is circumstantial evidence. Azhar went to a conference, and someone died a month later of a microorganism that he himself doesn’t even study.”

  “Someone who had taken his child from him died. Someone who had hidden that child’s whereabouts for many months. This, as you know, does not look good.”

  And it would look worse, Barbara reckoned, if Azhar’s part in Hadiyyah’s kidnapping became known. She said, “You can’t convict someone on circumstantial evidence.”

  Greco looked astonished. “On the contrary, Sergeant. Here, people are convicted for much less every day.”

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  It was without surprise that Salvatore Lo Bianco received the news that another representative from New Scotland Yard had appeared in Lucca. He had expected someone from London to show up once he’d arrested Taymullah Azhar. The word would have gone out to the British embassy via Aldo Greco, and the information would have filtered inevitably from the British embassy to the Metropolitan police. This was doubly the case because, once the arrest had been made, an English child was left without an English carer. Someone had to deal with that as she was no relation of Lorenzo Mura’s and Mura was merely sheltering her until other arrangements could be made. So to have a police presence from England on hand did not surprise him. He merely hadn’t expected that person to appear at the questura so quickly.

  It wasn’t DI Lynley, which was unfortunate. Not only had Salvatore liked the Englishman, it had also been convenient that Lynley spoke quite decent Italian. Indeed, he found it decidedly odd that the Metropolitan police would send someone to Lucca who didn’t speak Italian. But when Aldo Greco rang him and gave him her name and her details—including her lack of Italian—he agreed to see her. Greco assured him that the officer would bring a translator with her. Her companion—an English cowboy, Greco said—apparently had several contacts in the town, and one of them would see to it that Sergeant Havers was accompanied by a native speaker.

  Salvatore hadn’t thought much about what an English woman detective might look like, so he wasn’t prepared for the woman who came into his office some two hours after the phone call from Greco. When he saw her, he reflected on the fact that, perhaps, he’d been too influenced over the years by British television dramas dubbed into Italian. He’d anticipated, perhaps, someone along the lines of one distinguished and titled actress or another, a little hard round the edges but otherwise leggy, fashionably put together, and attractive. What walked into his office, howev
er, was the antithesis of all this, save for the hard-round-the-edges part. She was short, stout, and garbed in desperately wrinkled beige linen trousers, red trainers, and a partially untucked navy-blue tank top that hung from her plump shoulders. Her hair looked as if she’d put herself into the hands of her gardener who’d done double duty while trimming the hedges outside of her house. Her skin was beautiful—the British were served well by their damp climate, he thought—but it was shiny with perspiration.

  Accompanied by a bookish-looking woman with very large spectacles and very gelled hair, the English detective strode across the office to his desk with so much confidence and so much un-Italian disregard for her personal appearance that, grudgingly, he had to admire her. She held out a hand, which he discovered was damp. “DS Barbara Havers,” she said. “You don’t speak English. Right. Well. This is Marcella Lapaglia, and I’ll be square with you: Marcella’s the partner of a bloke called Andrea Roselli. He’s a journalist from Pisa, but she’s not going to give him any information unless you say it’s fine by you. She’s here to translate, and I’m paying her for it, and luckily she needs the money more than she needs Andrea’s approval at the moment.”

  Salvatore listened to this stream of babble and caught a word here and there. Marcella did a rapid translation. Salvatore didn’t like it one bit that this other woman was the lover of Andrea Roselli, and when he said this directly, Marcella told the English detective. They went back and forth a bit until he said, “Come? Come?” impatiently and Marcella paused to translate for him.

  “She’s a professional translator” were the English detective’s words via Marcella. “She knows how fast her career goes down the toilet if she spreads information she’s not meant to spread.”

  “This had better be the case,” Salvatore said directly to Marcella.

  “Certamente,” she told him evenly.

  “I work with DI Lynley in London,” DS Barbara Havers told him. “So I’m fairly well in the loop of what’s been happening over here. Mostly I’m here to deal with the kid—the professor’s daughter—and it’ll help me do that if I know exactly what you’ve got on Azhar and how likely it is that he’ll go to trial at some point. She’s going to have questions—Hadiyyah, the kid—and I’ll need to work out what to tell her. You c’n help me with that. What d’you have on Azhar—the professor—if you don’t mind my asking? I mean, I know he’s going down for murder—Mr. Greco told me—and I know about his job back in London and the conference in Berlin he attended and what Hadiyyah’s mother died of, as well. But . . . well, let’s be honest, Inspector Lo Bianco, far as I know at the moment unless you’ve got more than you’re saying, what you’ve got on him seems iffy at best, hardly the stuff on which arrests are made and charges drawn. So it seems to me, with your approval, I c’n tell Hadiyyah her dad’s going to be home soon enough. That is, like I say, unless there’s something here I don’t know about yet.”