Just One Evil Act

by Elizabeth George

  “Ah, capisco. This I will handle as well.”

  Which he had done in short order, clearly a man who had no back burner on the cooktop of his professional life. Within thirty minutes, it had all been arranged. Azhar would be ready for release in the morning, Salvatore would himself drive to the prison to fetch him, he would take Barbara along with him, and Barbara would be given the time to speak to Azhar privately so as to prepare him for his daughter’s state.

  Hadiyyah’s state, of course, was perfectly fine. There was much about what had occurred that she did not yet understand, and there would be much for her to process in the time to come. But like so many children, she was in and of the moment in which she lived. Salvatore’s mother had been a boon in the care of her. As long as Hadiyyah liked to learn Italian cooking and was quick about memorising the scores of Catholic saints whose holy cards Signora Lo Bianco presented to her, all was well.

  Barbara went out for a walk. She rang Mitchell Corsico. She had hopes he’d had second thoughts, hanging on to the idea of the reunion story—Father and Kidnapped Daughter Together at Last!—as bigger than the one he’d written with Dwayne Doughty’s information. But even as she gave thought to the hope, she knew it was an unreasonable one. International kidnapping scandals would always trump tender reunions between fathers and their children. Combine that scandal with Barbara’s own participation in the crimes that had gone down . . . One couldn’t have hopes.

  Once again Mitchell said, “Sorry, Barb. What could I do? But listen, you need to look at the story. You won’t be able to score a copy of the paper here in Lucca ’less you find a newsagent with English papers. But if you look online—”

  Once again, she ended the call, cutting him off midsentence. She’d learned all that she needed to learn. The project now was to get to Azhar.

  She could tell that Salvatore no longer trusted her, but as a man with a daughter Hadiyyah’s age, he was going to want to do what was right for the child. Barbara didn’t know what Aldo Greco said to the Chief Inspector, but whatever it had been, it worked. Before they each went off to their respective bedrooms in Torre Lo Bianco on the previous evening, he’d set the time for their departure to fetch Azhar back to Lucca, and he was as good as his word when it came to her accompanying him.

  They were silent on the route, for what else could they be in a situation in which neither of them spoke the other’s language. Barbara could tell she’d dealt a real blow to the Italian, and more than anything she wanted him to understand why she’d done as she had done.

  He saw her as on the take, no doubt. Anyone would. Police all over the world were dirty—not all of them, of course, but there were enough—and he would have little reason to think she was anything other than an inside source for the worst tabloid in London. That this wasn’t the case . . . How could she explain? Really, who would believe her in any language? She said to him again, “I bloody wish you spoke decent English, Salvatore. You think I betrayed you, but it wasn’t meant as betrayal and it wasn’t intended as a personal blow to you. Truth is . . . I bloody like you, mate. And now . . . with what happens next . . . ? That’s not going to be a personal blow either. But it’ll look like it. It’ll sodding look like I used you only to betray you again. I won’t mean it that way. Believe me, I won’t. God, I hope you’ll be able to understand someday. I mean, I c’n tell I’ve lost your trust and whatever good opinion you might’ve had about me and believe me I c’n see it in your face when you look at me. And I’m so bloody sorry about that, but I didn’t have a choice. I’ve never had a choice. At least not one that I could ever see.”

  He glanced at her as he drove. They were on the autostrada and traffic was heavy with commuters, with lorries, and with tourist coaches heading to their next glorious Tuscan destination. He said her name in a very kind tone which, for a moment, made her think she had his forgiveness and his understanding. But then he said, “Mi dispiace ma non capisco. E comunque . . . parla inglese troppo velocemente.”

  She had enough Italian at this point to understand that much. She’d heard it from him often enough. She said, “Mi dispiace as well, mate.” She turned to the window and watched the Italian scenery whizzing by: leafy vineyards, wonderful old farms, orchards of olive trees climbing hillsides, mountain villages in the distance, all of it crowned with a cloudless azure sky. Paradise, she thought. And then she added wryly, Lost.

  Arrangements had been made in advance at the prison where Azhar was being held. He was ready when they arrived, not a prisoner in a boiler suit any longer but a gentleman scientist in his white shirt and trousers, released into the company of the policeman who had investigated him and the policewoman who was his most determined friend. Ispettore Lo Bianco kept a respectful distance as Barbara and Azhar greeted each other.

  She spoke to the Pakistani man quietly, walking him ahead of Salvatore, linking her arm with his in a manner that would demonstrate warm friendship, leaning towards him, saying, “Listen, Azhar. It’s not how it looks, this thing. I mean your being released. It’s not how it looks.”

  He looked at her quickly, his dark eyes confused.

  She said, “It’s not over.” Quickly, she told him about Corsico’s story, which would be in The Source that morning. Doughty, she told him, had given Corsico everything in order to save his own neck. Names, dates, places, money exchanging hands, Internet hacking, the entire enchilada of information. She’d tried to stop the bloody journalist from writing the story, she said. She’d begged. She’d pleaded. She’d reasoned. And she’d failed.

  Azhar said, “What does this mean?”

  “You know. Azhar. You know. The Italian journalists are going to pick up on the story sometime today. Once they do, there’ll be a bloody big hue and cry. Someone is going to pursue the facts, and if it isn’t Salvatore, it’ll be some other detective who gets assigned. You’ll be detained again and I’ve burnt too many bridges with Salvatore to be able to help you.”

  “But at the end of the day . . . Barbara, they will see how little choice I had once Angelina left London and hid Hadiyyah from me. They will show compassion. They will—”

  “Listen to me.” She tightened her grip on his arm. “The Upmans are here in Lucca. They went to the questura yesterday and they’re bloody well going to go there today. They want Hadiyyah turned over to them. Salvatore held them off, but once the kidnapping story hits the papers here . . . And that’s supposing the Upmans haven’t already been rung up by Bathsheba from London telling them about the story in The Source, at which point, believe me, they’ll demand Hadiyyah because what kind of dad kidnaps his own kid and stows her in a convent with a madwoman who thinks she’s a nun, eh?”

  “I did not intend—”

  “D’you think they care what you intended? They hate you, mate, and you and I know it and they’ll go for custody of her just because they hate you, and they’ll bloody get it. Who cares that she means nothing to them? It’s you they’re after.”

  He was silent. Barbara glanced at Salvatore, who was speaking into his mobile, still a respectful distance from them. She knew how little time they had. Their conversation had already gone on too long for a woman who was only supposed to be passing along information about the state of her friend’s beloved child.

  She said, “You can’t go back to London. And you can’t stay here. You’re cooked either way.”

  His lips barely moved as he said, “What then do I do?”

  “Again, Azhar, I think you know. You’ve not got a choice.” She waited for him to take this in, and she saw on his face that he had done so, for he blinked hard and she thought she saw on his lashes the brilliance of unshed tears. She said, although she felt as if the pain of doing so might actually drive a sword through her heart, “You still have family there, Azhar. They’ll welcome her. They’ll welcome you. She speaks the language. Or at least she’s been learning it. You’ve seen to that.”

  “She w
on’t understand,” he said in an agonised voice. “How can I do this to her after what she has been through?”

  “You don’t have a choice. And you’ll be there for her. You’ll ease her way. You’ll see to it her life there is an extraordinary one. And she’ll adjust, Azhar. She’ll have aunts and uncles. She’ll have cousins. It will be okay.”

  “How can I—”

  Barbara cut in, choosing to interpret the rest of his question in the only way possible now. She said, “Salvatore has your passports, probably locked away in the questura. He’ll hand them over, and you and Hadiyyah and I will head to the airport. Fond farewells to him and all the rest. He may take us there, but he won’t stay to see where we go or even if we depart. I’ll go to London. You’ll go . . . wherever you can go to get a flight to Lahore. Just out of Italy. Paris? Frankfurt? Stockholm? It doesn’t matter as long as it’s not London. You’ll do what you have to do at this point because it’s the only thing left. And you know it, Azhar. You bloody know it.”

  He looked at her. She saw his dark eyes fill with tears. He said, “And you, Barbara? What about you?”

  “Me?” She tried to sound lighthearted. “I’ll face the music back in London. I’ve done it before, and I’ll survive. Facing the music is what I do best.”

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  First was Torre Lo Bianco, where Hadiyyah leapt into her father’s arms and buried her face in his neck. He held her close. She said, “Barbara told me you were helping Salvatore. Did you help him a lot? What did you do?”

  Azhar cleared his throat roughly. He smoothed back wisps of her hair and said with a smile, “Many, many things did I do. But it is time for us to go now, khushi. Can you thank the signora and Inspector Lo Bianco for taking such good care of you while I was away?”

  She did so. She hugged Salvatore’s mamma, who kissed her, got teary, and called her bella bambina, and she hugged Salvatore who said “Niente, niente” as she thanked him. She asked them both to tell Bianca and Marco arrivederci, and she said to Barbara, “D’you get to come home as well?”

  Barbara told her that indeed she did, and in very short order, they’d taken their bags to where Salvatore had left his car and they were on their way to the questura. At every moment, Barbara looked for some sign that Mitch Corsico’s page-one story had somehow broken in Italy. She also looked for the Upmans on every street corner and behind every bush as they coursed the route along the viale outside the town wall.

  At the questura, things moved rapidly and Barbara was immensely grateful for this. Passports were returned to Azhar, Hadiyyah was left in the company of Ottavia Schwartz, and the buxom translator was called in so that Azhar might hear Salvatore’s explanation of how Angelina Upman had come to die of ingesting a devastating strain of E. coli. He covered his mouth with his hand as he listened, and the pain in his eyes was evident. He pointed out that, had he been the one to drink the affected wine, it was likely he would have survived the subsequent illness. But because it had been Angelina who’d drunk it, Angelina who was already unwell with her pregnancy, things had been misinterpreted by her doctors until it was far too late. “I wished her no ill,” he concluded. “I would have you know that, Inspector.”

  “Plenty of ill was wished towards you, Azhar,” Barbara put in. “And I wager you wouldn’t have gone to hospital had you got ill. You would’ve thought you’d picked up a bug: on the flight, in the water, whatever, eh? You’d’ve got over the first bout with this stuff, but then the next step would’ve been a worse bout and losing your kidneys and probably dying as well. Lorenzo might not have known all that, but it wasn’t important to him. Making you suffer was what he had in mind, with the hope that making you suffer would lead to making you gone from Angelina’s life.”

  Salvatore listened to the translation of all this. Barbara cast a look in his direction, saw once again the solemnity of his expression, but also read the great kindness in his eyes. She knew that there was one more thing that had to be said in advance of Corsico’s damning kidnapping story breaking in the Italian papers.

  She said to Azhar, “C’n you give me a moment with . . .” And she nodded in Salvatore’s direction.

  He said of course, that he would go to Hadiyyah, that they would be waiting, and he left her alone with Salvatore and the translator to whom Barbara said, “Please tell him I’m sorry. Tell him, please, it was nothing personal, anything I did. It wasn’t meant as a betrayal or as using him or anything like that, although I bloody well know it looked that way. Tell him . . . See, I have this London journalist on my back—he’s the cowboy bloke Salvatore saw?—and he was here to help me help Azhar. See, Azhar’s my neighbour back in London and when Angelina took Hadiyyah from him, he was . . . Salvatore, he was so broken. And I couldn’t leave him like that, broken. Hadiyyah’s really all he has left in England in the way of family so I had to help him. And all of this . . . everything that’s gone on? Can you tell him it was all part of helping Azhar? That’s all, really. Because, see, this journalist has another story that he’s running and . . . that’s all that I can say, really. That’s all. That and I hope he understands.”

  Salvatore listened to the translation, which came nearly as rapidly as Barbara herself was speaking. He didn’t look at the translator, though. He remained as he had been before, with his gaze on Barbara’s face.

  At the end, there was silence. Barbara found that she couldn’t blame him for not replying and, indeed, that she didn’t actually want him to reply. For he was going to want to hunt her down and strangle her when he finally discovered what her next move had been, so to have his forgiveness in advance of betraying him another time . . . ? She didn’t know how she could contend with that anyway.

  She said, “So I’ll say thanks and good-bye. We c’n take a taxi to the airport or—”

  Salvatore interrupted. He spoke quietly and with what sounded like either kindness or resignation. She waited until he had finished and then said to the translator, “What?”

  “The ispettore says that it has been a pleasure to know you,” the translator replied.

  “He said more than that. He went on a bit. What else did he say?”

  “He said that he will arrange your transport to the airport.”

  She nodded. But then she felt compelled to add, “That’s it, then?”

  The translator looked at Salvatore and then back at Barbara. A soft smile curved her lips. “No. Ispettore Lo Bianco has said that any man on earth would find himself lucky to have had in his life such a friend as you.”

  Barbara wasn’t prepared. She felt the claw of emotion at her throat. She finally was able to say, “Ta. Thank you. Grazie, Salvatore. Grazie and ciao.”

  “Niente,” Salvatore said. “Arrivederci, Barbara Havers.”

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  Salvatore waited, patiently as always, in the anteroom of Piero Fanucci’s office. This time, though, it was not because Piero was forcing him to wait or because someone was being berated by il Pubblico Ministero inside his inner sanctum. Rather, it was because Piero had not yet returned from his lunch. He’d taken it later than usual, Salvatore had discovered, because of a lengthy meeting with three avvocati representing the family of Carlo Casparia. They had come on the not small matter of false arrest, false imprisonment, interrogations without an avvocato present, coerced confessions, and dragging the family name through the mud. Unless these issues were resolved to the satisfaction of la famiglia Casparia, il Pubblico Ministero was going to face an investigation into his investigation and have no doubt about that.

  Il drago had evidently done his usual bit upon hearing this unveiled threat. He’d breathed the roaring flames of segreto investigativo at the placid lawyers. He was under no obligation to tell them anything, he declared. Judicial secrecy ruled the day, not their pitiful claims on behalf of the Casparias.

  At this, the avvocati were not impres
sed. If that was how he wished to proceed, they informed the magistrato, so be it. They left the rest of their remarks hanging in the air. He would be hearing again from them soon.

  All of this Salvatore had from Piero’s secretary. She’d been present to take notes, which she was more than happy to share with him. It was her intention to outlive Piero in her position as secretary. Her hope had long been that outliving Piero meant watching him be summarily dismissed from his job. That looked highly probable now.

  Salvatore evaluated all the information as he waited. He put it onto the scales in which he had been weighing his next move since the departure of Barbara Havers and her London neighbours. He had felt unaccountably sad to see the dishevelled British woman depart. He knew he should have remained furious at her, but he’d found that fury was not among the feelings he had. Instead, he’d felt compelled to take her part. So when the Upmans arrived at the questura later that morning, he’d dealt with them by not dealing with them at all. Their granddaughter was with her father, he told them through the translator. As far as he knew, they both were now gone from Italy. He could be of no help to the signore and the signora. He could not assist them in wresting Hadiyyah from the custody of her father. “Mi dispiace e ciao,” he said to them. If they cared to know more—especially in regards to their daughter Angelina—they might wish to speak to Aldo Greco, whose English was superb. Or, if they had no wish to learn the truth about Angelina’s death, then they, too, could return to London. There, and not here, they could take up the matter of who would have custody of little Hadiyyah.

  Signor Upman’s subsequent mouth-frothing had done little to move Salvatore. He left the man standing alongside his wife in Reception, where Salvatore had met them.