Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  He would like, he told the research technician, to be shown everything in the lab. He would need the identification and the stated purpose of every item. He would need to know and to see all the strains of bacteria both in storage and undergoing experimentation.

  Bhaskar Goldbloom didn’t embrace the idea of a detailed tour. Instead, he pointed out pleasantly that, as far as he knew, Detective Inspector Lynley would need a search warrant for that sort of thing.

  Lynley was prepared for this response. It was, after all, reasonable and wise. He pointed out to Goldbloom that he could indeed go through channels in order to obtain the appropriate warrant, but his assumption had been that no member of Azhar’s lab would really want a team of policemen to come inside and mess things about. “Which,” he added, “I’d like to assure you they’d have no compunction at all about doing.”

  Goldbloom thought this one over. He said, at the end of his thinking, that he would need to phone Professor Azhar to obtain his permission. And this was the point at which Lynley informed Goldbloom and, through him, everyone else of Azhar’s perilous situation in Italy: under arrest for a murder by means of a bacteria and currently unavailable by phone.

  This changed the complexion of things at once. Goldbloom said he would cooperate with Lynley. He added, “How many hours do you have, Inspector?” in a sardonic tone. “Because this is going to take a while.”

  SOLLICCIANO

  TUSCANY

  When the phone call came through from Chief Inspector Lo Bianco, Barbara Havers and Mitchell Corsico were cooling their heels at a pavement table outside of a café in Corso Giuseppe Garibaldi where, at the moment, an outdoor market was offering a dazzling variety of foodstuffs from several dozen colourful stalls. They were imbibing the national beverage of Italy, a viscous liquid that was dubbed coffee—or at least caffè—but which only three cubes of sugar and a dousing with milk made remotely drinkable. Mitch had insisted that Barbara at least try the stuff. “If you’re going to be in Italy, for God’s sake, you c’n at least get behind the culture, Barb” was the way he had put it. She’d groused but cooperated. Once she’d had a shot of the mixture, she reckoned she’d be awake for the next eight days.

  When her mobile rang, giving her the news that Lo Bianco had arranged things so that she could see Azhar, she gave Mitchell Corsico the thumbs-up. He said, “Yes!” but he was less than pleased when she told him that she alone had been given access to the prisoner. Mitchell called foul, and she couldn’t blame him. He needed a story for The Source, he needed it fast, and Azhar was the story.

  She said to him, “Mitchell, Azhar’s yours the moment we spring him. The exclusive interview, the picture, Hadiyyah sitting on his lap and looking winsome, the whole plate of ravioli. It’s yours, but it can’t happen till we get him out of there.”

  “Look, you got me over here with a tale of—”

  “Everything I’ve told you has been true, yes? You don’t see anyone coming after your neck for spreading lies, do you? So have some patience. We get him out of prison, and he’s going to be grateful. Grateful, he’s going to give you an interview.”

  Corsico didn’t like the set-up, but he could hardly complain. Barbara’s position as a police officer had got her inside to see Lo Bianco in the first place. He knew this and had to live with it. Just as she had to live with whatever he came up with as story material at the end of the day.

  Azhar was being held at a prison, the customary lodging place for someone who’d been charged with murder. It was miles from Lucca, which necessitated another terrifying race on the autostrada, but they made good time and Lo Bianco had phoned ahead with instructions. It was not visiting hours. It was not a visiting day. But the police had access when they wanted access. In very short order once they arrived at the place, Barbara was ushered into a private interview room which, she suspected, was not generally used when family members came calling upon the incarcerated. She’d left behind her bag and everything in it in Reception. She was searched and wanded. She was thoroughly questioned and summarily photographed.

  Now in the centre of the room, she sat at its only table. This was fastened to the floor, as were its accompanying chairs. There was a large and grisly-looking crucifix fitted onto the wall, and Barbara wondered if this constituted a means of eavesdropping on what went on in the room. Microphones and cameras were so tiny now that one of the nails in Jesus’s feet and one of the thorns in his crown could easily contain them.

  She rolled her thumbs along the pads of her fingers and wished for a cigarette. A sign on the wall opposite the dying Jesus seemed to forbid smoking, however. She couldn’t read the Italian but the large circle containing a cigarette with a red slash through it was universal.

  After a minute or two, she got to her feet and began to pace. She gnawed on her thumbnail and wondered what was taking so long. When the door finally opened after a quarter of an hour, she half expected someone to come in and tell her the gaff was blown and her presence in Italy had not been confirmed—let alone sanctioned—by the London police. But when she swung round to face the door, it was Azhar who entered ahead of a guard.

  In an instant Barbara realised two facts about her neighbour from London. First, she had never seen him unshaven, which he now was. Second, she had never seen him when he was not garbed in a crisp white dress shirt. Sleeves neatly rolled up in summer, sleeves rolled down and cuffs buttoned in winter, sometimes with a necktie, sometimes with a jacket, sometimes with a pullover, accompanying jeans or trousers . . . It was always the dress shirt, as definite to him as the way he signed his name.

  Now, though, he wore prison garb. It was a boiler suit. It was a hideous shade of green. In combination with his unshaven face, with the dark patches of skin beneath his eyes, with his hollow expression of defeat, the sight of him made Barbara’s eyes prickle.

  He was, she could tell, horrified to see her. He stopped just inside the door, so quickly that the guard accompanying him stumbled and then barked, “Avanti, avanti,” which Barbara took to mean Azhar was to get his arse inside. When he’d cleared the doorway, the guard stepped within and closed the door. Barbara gave a silent curse when she saw this, but she understood. She was not his solicitor, so she could claim no privilege.

  Azhar spoke first. He did not sit. “You should not have come, Barbara,” he said futilely.

  She said, “Sit,” and gestured to a chair. She told him the lie she had prepared. “This isn’t about you. I’ve been sent by the Met because of Hadiyyah.”

  That, at least, prompted him to do as she said. He dropped into a chair and clasped his hands on the table. They were slender hands, lovely hands for a man. She’d always thought so, but now what she thought was that those hands would not serve him well in prison.

  She said to him quietly, very nearly in a whisper, “And how could I not have come, Azhar, once I heard about this?” She gestured to the room, to the prison.

  He matched the barely audible tone she employed. “You have done too much already to try to help me. There is no help for what has happened now.”

  “Oh, really? Why’s that? Did you actually do what they think you’ve done? Did you manage to get Angelina to down a dose of E. coli? What did you put it in, her morning oatmeal?”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Then, believe me, there’s help. But it’s time for you to start being straight with me. From A to Z. A’s the kidnapping, so let’s start there. I need to know everything.”

  “I’ve told you everything.”

  She shook her head bleakly. “That’s where you go wrong every time. You went wrong in December and you’ve gone wrong ever since. Why can’t you see that if you’re still lying about the kidnapping—”

  “What do you mean? There’s nothing that I—”

  “You wrote her a card, Azhar. Something for her kidnapper to hand to her so she would know for certain you were behind the s
natching. You had him call her khushi and then give her a card, and in that card you told her to go with the man because he would bring her to you. Does this sound familiar?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She hissed, “Now, when in hell’re you going to stop lying to me? And how in hell d’you expect me to help you if you won’t start telling me the truth? About everything. DI Lynley gave me a copy of that card, by the way. And you can wager everything you’ve ever owned that the Lucca coppers are having the handwriting verified by an expert even as we speak. What the bloody hell were you thinking? Why did you take that risk?”

  His reply was nearly inaudible. “I had to make sure she went with him. I told him to call her khushi, but how could I know that would be enough? I was desperate, Barbara. Can you not understand that? I had not seen my child in five months. What if she hadn’t gone with someone who merely called her khushi? What if instead she had told Angelina that a stranger had approached her in the market, trying to lure her beyond the walls? Angelina would have made it impossible for anyone to get near her after that. Hadiyyah would have been lost to me forever.”

  “Well, that’s been taken care of, hasn’t it?”

  He looked at her in horror. “I did not—”

  “Do you see how it looks? How everything looks? You hire a detective to find her, then you kidnap her, then you come over here playing at Concerned Dad, and you’ve got tickets to Pakistan. Hadiyyah gets found, hugs and kisses all round, and in very short order Angelina dies. And what she dies of is a microorganism and you’re a bloody microbiologist. Are you following me? This is how a case is built, Azhar. And if you don’t start being straight with me about what you know and what you’ve done and how you’ve done it, then I can’t help you and, more important, I can’t help Hadiyyah. Full stop.”

  “I did not,” he murmured brokenly.

  “Yeah? Well, someone bloody did,” she whispered fiercely. “Lo Bianco’s onto a bloke passing you a petri dish of E. coli when you were in Berlin. Or posting it to you afterwards. Someone called von Lohmann, from Heidelberg. Meantime, The Source has dug up a woman from Glasgow who studies E. coli and who was also at this bloody conference. You were on a panel with the Heidelberg bloke, and for all I know you played hide-the-salami with the Glasgow woman when the sun went down, all the better to get her ready to hand over a vial of bacteria when you needed it.”

  He flinched. He said nothing. His eyes were pained.

  She sighed and said, “Sorry. Sorry. But you have to see how things look and how they’re going to look when all the pieces get put together. So if there’s anything—and I mean anything at all—that you haven’t told me, now’s the time.”

  At least he didn’t respond at once. This, Barbara thought, was a good sign because it meant he was thinking instead of just reacting. She needed that from him. Thinking and remembering both. And, she knew, he would pass along the information she’d given him so that his solicitor might have the information as to how Lo Bianco was building his case. So all wasn’t lost, and she needed very much to keep things that way.

  He said, “There is nothing more. You know it all now.”

  “Have you any message for Hadiyyah, then? She’s where I intend to head next.”

  He shook his head. He said, “She must not know,” and he lifted his fingers in a tired gesture that spoke of his whereabouts and his state of mind.

  “Then I won’t tell her,” Barbara said. “Let’s hope Mura has the same intention.”

  FATTORIA DI SANTA ZITA

  TUSCANY

  Mitchell Corsico had a map to assist with the location of Fattoria di Santa Zita. He even knew who Santa Zita was. During his downtime in Lucca—which, as he put it, there had been a hell of a lot of—he’d seen the highlights of the town, and Santa Zita’s corpse was one of them, encased in a glass coffin in the church of San Frediano, up on an altar, kitted out in her maid’s clothes, he reported. Just the stuff to enhance every kid’s nightmares. God only knew why Lorenzo Mura’s property was named after her.

  Barbara had already decided that she couldn’t take Corsico with her to Lorenzo Mura’s home. She hadn’t the first clue what was going to happen when she showed her mug at his place, and she didn’t want a journalist there to exploit what went down. She thought at first that leaving Mitchell behind would be a problem, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. From their excursion to the prison, he had to devise a story to send to his editor and he had limited time in which to do it. He’d remain in Lucca while she went to the fattoria, he told her, but he would expect a report from her, and it had better be a full one.

  Right, Barbara told him. Whatever you say, Mitch.

  On their way back from the prison, she cooperatively fed the journalist what details she could from her visit with Azhar, going heavy on the atmosphere of the place, on Azhar’s physical and emotional condition, and on the jeopardy that he faced with regard to the investigation. She went light on everything else, and the kidnapping she didn’t bring up at all.

  No fool, Corsico didn’t take to her limited facts like a baby swallowing a spoonful of honey with the medicine. He jotted down notes, he demanded to know what the circumstances of the circumstantial evidence were, he asked good questions that she did her best to dodge, and at the end he reminded her of their relative positions. If she double-crossed him, she would be sorry, he told her.

  “Mitchell, we’re in this together,” she reminded him.

  “Don’t forget that” was his parting shot.

  Azhar had told Barbara where Fattoria di Santa Zita was, and once she and Mitchell located the place on his map, she set off in his hire car after leaving him on the pavement along Via Borgo Giannotti outside of the city wall. She watched him duck into a café. When he was out of sight, she proceeded up the street, heading for the River Serchio and out of the town.

  Fattoria di Santa Zita, she found, was high in the hills and up an unnerving road of hairpin turns and precipitous drops. The countryside here combined forest with agricultural land, and the agricultural land was heavily given to vineyards and olive groves. The fattoria was marked with an easily noticeable sign. The reason for this sign she discovered once she made the left turn and headed into the place: She nearly hit a yellow convertible MG on her route, a classic vehicle swervingly operated by a young man whose passenger was intent upon nibbling his neck. Brakes were applied all round, and the driver of the MG yelled out, “Whoops! Sorry about that! Hey, have the oh-seven Sangiovese. We bought a case of it. You can’t go wrong. Jesus, Caroline, get your hand out of there!” And with bursts of laughter from him and his companion, he managed to manoeuvre the MG past Barbara’s car and hence to the road.

  From all this, Barbara reckoned that wine tasting went on at Fattoria di Santa Zita, and she discovered soon enough that she was not wrong. Perhaps a quarter of a mile along the unpaved lane, she came to the driveway into the fattoria. Not much farther and she saw an ancient barn with a heavy arbour of wisteria draping lavender flowers towards a scattering of rustic tables and chairs.

  The doors to the barn were open, and Barbara parked close by in the space designated for tasters. She crossed the gravel and then the flagstone terrace where the tables stood. It was dim in the barn, so when she went inside, she paused for her eyes to adjust to the change in light.

  She expected to see Lorenzo Mura, but she did not. What she saw was a roughly hewn bar set up with wineglasses, a display of the wines ostensibly made on the property, a basket of savoury biscuits, and four wedges of cheese contained beneath a glass dome on a cutting board. The air was so fragrant with the scent of wine that she reckoned she could get tipsy just by breathing deeply. She did so and her mouth watered in anticipation. A glass of wine wouldn’t have gone down half bad, and she wouldn’t have minded a few pieces of cheese either.

  A young man emerged from a cavernous room beyond the tasting area, where Barbara could see three stainless steel va
ts and row upon row of empty green bottles. He said, “Buongiorno. Vorrebbe assaggiare del vino?” and she stared at him uncomprehendingly. Apparently, he read this for what it was because he switched to English, which he spoke with what sounded like a Dutch accent. He said, “English? Would you like to try some Chianti?”

  Barbara showed her police identification. She was there to speak to Lorenzo Mura, she said.

  “Up at the villa” was his reply. He waved towards the interior of the barn, as if the villa could be accessed from there. He went on to explain how to get to the place. Drive or walk, he told her, it wasn’t far. Follow the road, curve past the old farmhouse, go through the gates, and then you’ll see it. “He might be on the roof,” he told her.

  “You work for him, I s’pose?” Barbara said. He looked to be somewhere in his twenties, probably a European student having a spring-through-summer work/study/play in Italy. He said that he did, and when she asked if there were more of his ilk about the property, he said no. He was the only one working on the farm at present, aside from the blokes who were working on the farmhouse and the villa.

  “Been here long, then?” she asked.

  He’d arrived only the week before, he told her. She scratched him from her list of potential suspects.

  She went by foot the rest of the way to the villa. She noted the size of the operation that Lorenzo Mura had going at the fattoria. Not only did vineyards fall down a hillside overlooking a rather stupendous view of mountain villages, more vineyards in the distance, and other farms, but olive groves promised a source of income from oil, and cattle grazing near a stream far below suggested beef products as well.