Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  Within Squali’s wallet, Salvatore also found the man’s driving licence, two credit cards, and five business cards. Three of these were from boutiques in Lucca, one was from a restaurant in the town, and the fifth was the link he had prayed to see: something that tied this man to Michelangelo Di Massimo. It was the private investigator’s card and on it was his name, the number of his mobile, and the address of his questionable centre of operations in Pisa.

  “Guardi qui,” Salvatore said to Lynley. He handed the card to him, waited while the other man put on his reading spectacles, and met his gaze when Lynley looked up quickly. “Sì,” Salvatore said with a smile. “Addesso abbiamo la prova che sono connessi.”

  “Penso proprio di sì,” Lynley said in agreement. They had their tie between the two men. “E la bambina?” he continued. “Che pensa?”

  Salvatore looked round them and then up at the mountains that surrounded them on every side. The little girl had been with this man, he thought. He was sure of that. But not at the moment when he’d gone over the cliff. He told Lynley this and the London man nodded. Salvatore returned to his inspection of the car, however, and soon enough he had what he was looking for.

  It was a hair caught up in the mechanics of the seatbelt. It was long. It was dark. A test would tell them if it was Hadiyyah’s. Dusting the vehicle for prints would also tell them if the child had ridden in the car. The only piece of information that the car couldn’t give them was what had happened to her and where she was now.

  Both men knew the hard reality of the situation with which they were faced, however: If Roberto Squali had indeed taken Hadiyyah from the mercato in Lucca, if he indeed had been the man seen leading a little girl into the woods somewhere along this road from which his car had toppled, where was she now? What had happened to her? For the truth was that the area in which they stood was vast, and if Squali had handed the child off to another or had killed and disposed of her somewhere to fulfill a sick fantasy, the location in which either of these things had occurred was going to prove almost impossible to find.

  Salvatore considered cadaver dogs. Pray God, he thought, they would not have to use them.

  VILLA RIVELLI

  TUSCANY

  Sister Domenica Giustina was light-headed from the fasting. She was sore from kneeling on the hard stone floor. She was thick in the brain from going without sleep, and she was still waiting for God to send her a sign about what it was He wished her to do next.

  She’d failed with Carina. The child simply had not understood the crucial importance of what had lain before them both. Something within her had stirred her to fear and trepidation. And now, instead of joyful acceptance, curious playfulness, and eager cooperation with every aspect of life at the Villa Rivelli, the child kept her distance from Sister Domenica Giustina. She watched and she waited. Sometimes, she hid. This was not good.

  Sister Domenica Giustina had begun to think that she had, perhaps, misinterpreted what she’d seen as she’d watched her cousin’s car come roaring up the narrow mountain road. She’d known God’s hand was behind the car’s ripping through the crash barrier, flying into space, and disappearing. What she did not know and had to clarify was what it meant that God had placed her at that precise moment in a position to see what end had been met by her cousin Roberto. The sight of his car shooting into the void had seemed an illustration of the importance of being shriven of sins, but perhaps it meant something else entirely.

  For this reason had she fasted and prayed. As a form of scourging, she tightened the swaddling that was a torment to her flesh. At the end of forty-eight hours like this, she rose with some difficulty but without the peace of knowing what she was meant to do. God’s answer hadn’t come from her suffering and her supplication. Perhaps, she thought, it would come from careful attention to a soft breeze that she could hear blowing through the trees of the forest that edged the immediate grounds of the villa. Perhaps God’s voice would be on that breeze.

  She went outside. She felt the restorative light wind on her cheeks. She paused at the top of the stone steps that led to her rooms above the barn, and she gazed upon the shuttered villa and wondered if the answers she sought might be contained within its walls. For she needed answers soon at this point. Roberto’s terrible passage from the mountain road into the vacancy of space told her that.

  She descended the stone steps. She began to consider an important way in which she might have misunderstood. She’d been dwelling upon Roberto’s demise when, perhaps, he had not met his end at all. If that was the case, then seeking God’s message in the death of her cousin would be a completely useless activity. She should, in other words, have been seeking God’s message in something else.

  There would be a sign of this. There had always been signs, and if she was correct in this new understanding, something was going to tell her soon. It seemed to her that the only place a sign might come to her was the same spot where she’d seen the last sign. So she went to where the low wall allowed her a view of the road that twisted up from the valley floor, and in very short order, she was given precisely what she had been praying for.

  Even at this distance from the place where Roberto’s car had crashed through the barrier, she could see the police cars. More important, she could see that among them un’ambulanza stood. As she watched, so far from them, she made out the workers carrying a stretcher up from some point below the twist of road. When they had lifted it onto the tarmac, they paused, and someone waiting for them bent over the stretcher as if to have a word with whoever rode upon it. This did not take long, after which the stretcher was loaded into the ambulance and it drove away.

  Sister Domenica Giustina watched all this, her heart feeling as if it would catch in her chest. It was hard to believe what she was witnessing, but there could be no doubt in interpreting what she’d seen. Even as she had prayed and fasted within her cell, seeking to understand God’s intention for her, her cousin Roberto had lain injured within the wreckage of his car. It came to Sister Domenica Giustina that both she and her cousin Roberto had been challenged. Have faith through suffering, their God had proclaimed. I will move in your life as I will.

  It was challenge, she realised. It was all about challenge. It was about not giving up for an instant, no matter the blackness of what lay ahead.

  Job had faced this. Abraham had faced this as well. In the case of that great patriarch of the Hebrews, the challenge he’d endured surpassed any other that God had ever given to man. Sacrifice your son Isaac to me, God had demanded of his servant Abraham. Take him into the mountains, build an altar of stone, and upon that altar put your sword to his throat. Let his blood flow forth. Burn his body. In this way prove your love for Me. This will not be easy, but it is what I ask. Obey your God.

  Yes, yes, she understood at last. A challenge such as Abraham’s could only be a challenge if it was not easy.

  BOW

  LONDON

  She would get it all done, Barbara told herself. But first she had to talk to Doughty. After that, she’d be back on track, heading south of the river first and then doing the north London bit at the end of the day. These things always took time. No interview went like clockwork. She would be able to smooth the rough edges of her day’s employment in such a way as to please anyone who decided to scrutinise it.

  At the Bow Road station she identified herself and was in short order escorted to the interview room in which Dwayne Doughty was cooling his heels. He’d been there for more than an hour, she was told. His sole reaction so far had been the demand of “What the hell is going on, you sods?”

  When she walked into the room, Doughty said, “You again?” At the narrow table, he had a plastic cup of tea with a skin of cooling milk formed on its surface. He shoved this to one side, and its contents sloshed out. “Bloody hell,” he went on. “I’ve told you everything. What more do you want from me?”

  Barbara evaluated him before she spoke. He wasn’t as cool a customer as he’d been in their earlier
encounters, so she reckoned this jaunt to the nick had been a very good idea. A sour smell came off him—he must have begun sweating like a glass holding a bad martini the moment uniforms had shown up in his office—and he’d loosened his necktie and unbuttoned the top of his shirt to reveal a band of oily sweat round the inside of the collar.

  “What the fuck is this about?” he demanded.

  She sat. She put her shoulder bag on the floor and took her time about digging out her notebook and pencil. She flipped the notebook open and then studied the detective. “Azhar’s alibi checks out,” she told him.

  He exploded like an overblown balloon. “I bloody told you that!” he snapped. “I looked into it myself. You paid me to do it, I did it, I made my report to you, and if that doesn’t prove to you that I’m walking on the sodding right side of the bleeding law—”

  “The only thing that’s ever going to prove that is the full truth, Dwayne. The whole A to Z of it, if you read my meaning.”

  “I’ve given you the full truth. I’ve got nothing more to give. This ‘interview’ or whatever the hell you’re up to here is bloody well over. I know my rights, and one of them isn’t to sit here and have you harp on things we’ve already discussed. The cops asked me to come in for a few questions. I came in cooperatively. And now I’m leaving.” He shoved back from the table.

  “They’ve made an arrest in Italy,” she told him.

  That stopped him like a fist in the face. He said nothing, but he also didn’t move.

  “They’re holding a bloke called Carlo Casparia,” she said. “We’re about twenty-four hours from tracing him to you. So what I’d suggest is that you come clean before we pack you up, put you on a plane, and deliver you to the cops in Lucca.”

  “You can’t do that.” But he sounded rather stiff when he spoke.

  “Dwayne, you’d be surprised, amazed, astonished, and gobsmacked at what we can do when our little minds get going. Now the way I see things, you have a decision to make. You can tell me everything, or you can act the leaky hosepipe like you’ve been doing from the first, giving me information in dribs and drabs.”

  “I told you the truth,” he said, but his tone had definitely altered. Barbara heard no outrage in it at this point but rather intensity, and this change was a good thing. It meant his mind was working on all cylinders and her job was to oil the gears of his brain so the entire mechanism began to operate in her direction. “I gave all the information I had to Professor Azhar,” Doughty said. “I swear it. What the professor did with it, I don’t know and I have no clue. He wanted the kid back, you know that. Maybe he found someone over there to snatch her for him. What I did—and I’ve already told you this—was hire a bloke in Italy once we learned a bank account in Lucca was involved. I gave him the information, the professor. I also told him the name of the bloke who did the work for me. Michelangelo Di Massimo. Now, if Professor Azhar then hired Di Massimo to take things further . . . I had nothing to do with that.”

  Barbara nodded, unimpressed. It was a nice performance verbally, but she watched the private detective’s eyes as he spoke. They were as jittery as the rest of him was. They fairly danced in his head. And his fingers were restless, tapping in unison against his thumbs.

  “So you say,” she said. “But I expect this Carlo Casparia they’ve got over there is saying something else. See, he’s not going to want to take the fall for this, not completely, because no one ever does. And what I reckon is that between him and that Michelangelo bloke, someone’s not going to have your skill set when it comes to wiping hard drives, emails, and telephone records and God knows what else squeaky clean. So my guess is that in the next day or so, there’s going to be a trail uncovered that leads from Casparia to Michelangelo to you, dates and times included. And you’re going to have one bloody hell of a time trying to explain it all away. See, Dwayne, the trouble with cooking up schemes like this one to snatch Hadiyyah is that the old ‘no honour among thieves’—or in this case kidnappers—always applies. You get more than one person involved, and someone’s going to break, because when it comes to necks being saved, most people choose their own.”

  Doughty was silent. He was, of course, evaluating all this for its potential to be the truth. Barbara herself didn’t know what this bloke Casparia had to do with anything, but if dropping his name and his arrest and stretching things from there was going to get her one step closer to Hadiyyah, she intended to drop it at every opportunity.

  Doughty finally spoke. “All right.”

  “Meaning?”

  He looked away from her. He was suddenly still, and only a steadying breath moved his body. “It was Professor Azhar’s idea from the first.”

  Barbara narrowed her eyes. “What was Professor Azhar’s idea?”

  “To find her, to plan it all, to wait until the time was right, then to snatch her. The right time turned out to be when he was in Berlin for his conference, establishing an alibi. The kid was supposed to be snatched and held in a location until Azhar could get there and fetch her back to London.”

  “Bollocks,” Barbara said.

  Doughty’s gaze flew back to her. “I’m telling you the truth!”

  “Oh, are you? Aside from a few little problems having to do with getting her out of Italy and into England without a passport, what was supposed to happen when Azhar got her back to London, eh? Let me tell you: What was supposed to happen is what actually happened, which is why your tale is rubbish. Hadiyyah’s mum showed up, demanding her back, because the first person she suspected of having snatched her daughter was the dad she’d stolen her from in the first place.”

  “Right, right,” Doughty said. “That’s how it was supposed to play out. She’d show up, he’d prove to her that he didn’t have the girl, he’d return to Italy with the mother, and then—while he was in Italy—she’d be handed over to him. And he’s there now, isn’t he? Isn’t that proof enough for what I’m trying to tell—”

  “Same problem, mate. Double problem, actually. He doesn’t have her, and even if he does or if he knows where she is and is putting on the performance of a lifetime for the Italian cops, my colleague over there, and everyone else, what’s next on the chart for him when she’s handed over? Is he supposed to bring her back to London without her mum ever knowing she’s here?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. It didn’t make any difference to me. All he wanted from me was information and that’s what I gave him. End of story.”

  “Not quite, mate. You’re doing nothing but trying to drop a load of cow manure on me. If you think that’s going to come close to convincing me you aren’t in this up to your eyeballs, then you’re bloody wrong. So let’s start again. And believe me, I’ve got hours to spare till we get to the truth.”

  “I’ve told you—”

  “Hours and hours,” she said pleasantly.

  He seemed to think frantically of where to go next with his wild allegations, and he finally said with a snap of his fingers, “Khushi, then.”

  Barbara drew in a deep breath.

  He said it again. “Khushi, Sergeant Havers. Would I say that if I was lying to you? Professor Azhar said this to me: ‘She’ll listen to someone who calls her khushi because she’ll know the message is from me.’”

  Barbara’s mouth went dry. She could feel her lips sticking to the front of her teeth. Happiness was the definition of the word khushi, but it was from the word itself that the impact came. For khushi was Azhar’s nickname for his daughter, and Barbara had heard the man say it hundreds of times in the two years that she’d known him.

  She felt as if the chair she was sitting on was sinking into the floor of the room. Doughty’s face got wavy in her vision. She blinked and tried to fight off dizziness.

  The bloody man, she realised, was finally telling her the truth.

  BOW

  LONDON

  Dwayne Doughty knew there was very little time at this point. He was into this mess up to his nostrils, the sweating nerve-st
rung personification of the best laid plans of mice and men, et cetera. Once he was back out in the street—with his hours at the Bow Road nick just an aftertaste like burnt garlic in his mouth—he made for his office. There were things to be done and he was going to have to use every one of his skills to bring about the result he needed. Failing that, he knew that the barrel-shaped and outstandingly ill-dressed Met officer was completely right: A study of Michelangelo Di Massimo’s phone records and computer files was going to provide trails leading in more than one direction. Since Dwayne could hardly export the talented Bryan Smythe to deal with the Italian phone system and whatever went for the Pisan detective’s technology, he—Dwayne—was going to have to set up a series of offensive manoeuvres.

  In the Roman Road, he pounded up the stairs to his office. He shouted, “Emily!” as he went. Her blagging expertise was going to be required. So was the superlative hacking expertise of Bryan Smythe and every one of his well-placed contacts.

  Emily’s door was open. Two cardboard boxes sat outside her office in the area at the top of the stairs. They were taped and ready . . . but ready for what Dwayne didn’t know until he walked into the room that housed her operation and saw exactly what she intended.

  She’d removed her tailored pinstriped jacket, her waistcoat, and her tie. They all lay across the back of her chair. This chair she’d pushed against the window, the better to access the inside of her desk, her files, her supplies, and everything else that marked her employment.

  She shot him a look in the midst of dumping the contents of a drawer willy-nilly into an open box. “Don’t,” she said.

  “Don’t what? What’re you doing?”

  “Don’t ask me what I’m doing when you can see for yourself. Or don’t play dumb. Or don’t be a fool. How about don’t put us in jeopardy? Take your pick.” She reached for the Sellotape and sealed the box. She heaved it up, heaved herself likewise, and carried the box past him in the doorway. She dumped it on top of the others and returned to her office, where, at a bulletin board, she began pulling down her map of London along with bus schedules, train schedules, a map of the Underground, and—for some reason—a poster of Montacute House and three picture postcards featuring the Cliffs of Moher, Beachy Head, and the Needles on the Isle of Wight.