Just One Evil Act il-18

by Elizabeth George

  “To make sure I understand, Magistrato,” Salvatore said carefully. “You mean that you believe Carlo sold the little girl to Roberto Squali?”

  “Certo. And Squali is the direction you are to head in: to find the point in the chain where the link exists leading you from him to Carlo.”

  “But Piero, what you suggest . . . A simple comparison with the tourist’s photographs shows that Carlo is not likely to be involved at all.”

  Fanucci’s eyes narrowed but his smile did not falter. “And your reason is . . . ?”

  “My reason is that one of the photos shows this man Squali with a card that, in a picture that follows, appears to be in the hand of the girl. Does this not suggest that he and not Carlo followed her from the mercato on the day she went missing?”

  “Bah!” was Fanucci’s reply. “This man Squali . . . He is in the mercato how often, Topo? This one time? While Carlo and the girl are there weekly, sì? So what I’m telling you is that Carlo knew this man, Carlo knew what he wanted, Carlo saw this girl, and Carlo laid his plan, based on the girl’s movements that he and not Roberto Squali had studied. So we will talk to Carlo again, my friend. And from him we will learn this Squali’s intentions. Prior to this he has not mentioned the name Roberto Squali to me. But when instead I say it to him . . . ? Aspetta, aspetta.”

  Salvatore could see how it would play out, now that Fanucci had a name to use in another interrogation of Casparia. He’d pull him out of custody and back into an interview room for another eighteen or twenty or twenty-five hours without food or drink, just enough time for Carlo to begin “imagining” how he and Roberto Squali came to be best friends, intent upon kidnapping a nine-year-old girl for reasons that would be invented on the spot.

  “Piero, for God’s sake,” Salvatore said. “You know in your heart that Carlo is not involved in this. And what I’m telling you now, with these details about Roberto Squali—”

  “Salvatore,” il Pubblico Ministero said in a pleasant tone, “I know in my heart nothing of the sort. Carlo Casparia has confessed. He has signed his confession without coercion. This, I assure you, people do not do if they are innocent. And Carlo is not an innocent man.”

  VICTORIA

  LONDON

  Barbara Havers sat through the morning’s meeting in the incident room with her mind in turmoil, although she managed to keep her expression attentive to DI John Stewart’s endless droning. She also kept her wits about her when he required from her an oral presentation of what she’d gleaned from her three interviews on the previous day. Never mind that she’d been at the Yard past ten o’clock at night, dutifully putting her reports in order for the man’s perusal. Stewart was obviously still on his mission to trip her in her tracks.

  Sorry to disappoint you, mate, was Barbara’s thought as she made her report. Still, it gave her little enough satisfaction to prove the DI wrong about her. For most of her was in a decided twist over what she’d heard from Dwayne Doughty when she’d spoken to him at the Bow Road nick.

  Khushi had given her a very bad night. Khushi had insisted that she ring Taymullah Azhar in Italy and demand a few answers. What stopped her from doing this was a basic tenet about police work: You don’t give away the game when you’re in the middle of it, and you sure as bloody hell do not clue in a suspect that he is a suspect when he doesn’t think he’s a suspect at all.

  Yet the idea of Azhar as a suspect felt like a hot coal lodged in her throat even now, in the midst of the morning meeting. Azhar was, after all, her friend. Azhar was, after all, a man whom Barbara thought she knew well. The idea of Azhar being in reality someone who could orchestrate the kidnap of his own daughter was unthinkable. For no matter how she looked at the matter, the same facts that she’d delivered to Dwayne Doughty remained at the core of what the private detective was alleging about Azhar: His work and his life were in London, so even if he had somehow arranged the snatching of his daughter, how the hell was he supposed to have put his mitts on her passport, eh? And even if he’d somehow managed to produce another passport for her, he would have then returned with her to London and Angelina Upman would have done exactly what she did do in the company of Lorenzo Mura, which was to turn up on Azhar’s doorstep demanding the return of her child.

  Yet . . . there was khushi. Barbara tried to come up with a reason why Doughty might have known this pet name that Azhar had for his daughter. She supposed Azhar might have told the man in passing, perhaps at some point referring to Hadiyyah that way. But in all the time Barbara had known him, she’d only heard him use the word when he was speaking to Hadiyyah. He never referred to her with the term. So why would he refer to her as khushi when speaking to Doughty? she wondered. The answer seemed to be that he wouldn’t. But that answer begged the question: What was she going to do next, post Doughty’s allegations?

  Ringing someone seemed the only answer: ringing Lynley in order to lay before him the facts she had and to ask his advice or ringing Azhar and cleverly gleaning from him some indication that Doughty’s claims were either true or false. Barbara wanted to do the first. But she knew she had to do the second. Had Azhar been in London, she could have confronted him in order to watch his face when she spoke. But he wasn’t in London and Hadiyyah was still missing and she had no real choice in the matter of what to do next, did she?

  She waited for an opportune moment long after the morning meeting when DI Stewart was otherwise engaged. She reached Azhar on his mobile, but the connection was bad. It turned out that he was in the Alps, he told her, and for a moment she thought he’d actually gone to Switzerland for some mad reason. When she yelped, “The Alps?” he clarified with, “These are the Apuan Alps. They are north of Lucca,” and the connection improved as he moved into what he said was a small piazza in one of the villages tucked into those mountains.

  He was searching it, he told her. He intended to search every village he came upon as he travelled higher and higher on a road that twisted into the Alps. It was from this road that a red convertible had crashed down a cliff, the driver dying when thrown from it. And inside this convertible, Barbara—

  At this, the poor man’s voice wavered. Barbara’s hands and her feet went completely dead. She said, “What? Azhar, what?”

  “They think Hadiyyah was with this man,” he said. “They have gone to Angelina’s home for her fingerprints, for DNA samples, for . . . I do not know what else.”

  Barbara could tell he was trying not to weep. She said, “Azhar.”

  “I could not just remain in Lucca and wait for news. They will compare the car—what they find in it and on it—and they will then know, but I . . . To hear she might have been with him and then to know . . .” A silence, then a barely controlled gasp. Barbara knew how humiliating it would be for him to be heard weeping by anyone. He said at last, “Forgive me. This is unseemly.”

  “Bloody hell,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Azhar, this is your daughter we’re talking about. There is no ‘I should not’ between you and me when it comes to Hadiyyah, okay?”

  This appeared to make matters worse, for then he sobbed, managing only “Thank you” and nothing more.

  She waited. She wished she were there, wherever he was in the Alps, because she would have taken him into her arms for what comfort she could offer in this situation. But it would have been a cold comfort indeed. When a child went missing, each day that passed was a day that lessened the possibility of that child’s ever being found alive.

  Azhar finally managed to give her more details as well as a name: Roberto Squali. He was at the heart of what had happened to Hadiyyah. He was the driver of the crashed car, who was dead.

  “A name is a starting place,” Barbara told him. “A name, Azhar, is a good starting place.”

  Which brought her, of course, to the pet name khushi and the reason for her call. But she couldn’t find it in herself to mention this to Hadiyyah’s father just now. He was already upset enough with this turn of events. Asking him about khushi or making in
sinuations about his putative Berlin alibi or requiring of him definitive proof that he wasn’t the mastermind behind the disappearance of a most beloved child as claimed by the private investigator he’d hired . . . Barbara realised she couldn’t do this to him. For the very idea that he would set off to Berlin and establish an alibi while someone he’d hired in Italy was snatching his daughter from a public market . . . It didn’t make sense. Not when one put Angelina Upman into the picture. Unless, of course, the plan was to hold Hadiyyah somewhere until her mother came to believe she was dead. But what mother of a missing child ever gave up hope? And even if this was the plan and Azhar intended somehow to spirit his daughter back to England sans passport at some point six or eight or ten months from now, what was Hadiyyah supposed to do then? Never contact her mother again?

  None of these conjectures made sense to Barbara. Azhar was innocent. He was in intolerable pain. And what she didn’t need to do at the moment was to make things worse with pointed questions about Dwayne Doughty’s claims and his declaration of khushi, as if a word in Urdu held the key to a life-and-death puzzle that seemed to enlarge with every day that passed.

  LUCCA

  TUSCANY

  By late morning, Salvatore had the confirmation for his suspicions. The missing child’s fingerprints were, indeed, in the red convertible. Forensic officers in the company of DI Lynley had gone to Fattoria di Santa Zita to obtain samples from the little girl’s bedroom: fingerprints as well as DNA from her hairbrush and toothbrush. The DNA results would not come in for some time. But the fingerprints had been a matter of a few hours only, to collect them, to take them to the laboratory, and to compare them to what had been found in the car, on the sides of the leather passenger seat, on the seatbelt’s buckle, and on the fascia. DNA was hardly necessary after that, but since DNA results had long since become de rigueur during trials, appropriate tests would be made.

  For his own work, however, Salvatore didn’t need those results. What he needed was an interview with anyone who knew Roberto Squali, and he began with the man’s home address. This was in Via del Fosso, a north-south lane through the walled city. This route was, most unusually, cut down its centre by a narrow canal from which fresh ferns sprang between crevices on its edges, and Squali’s residence was on the west side of this canal, through a heavy door that hid one of Lucca’s fine private gardens.

  Most men of Squali’s age in Italy did not live alone. Rather, they lived at home with their parents, generally waited upon by their doting mammas until such a time as they married. But this did not prove true for Roberto Squali. As things turned out, Squali was from Rome and his parents still lived there. The young man himself had a residence at the home of his paternal aunt and her husband, and upon questioning them, Salvatore discovered that such had been the case since Roberto’s adolescence.

  The aunt and uncle—surnamed Medici (alas, no relation)—met with Salvatore in the garden, where beneath the branches of a fig tree, they sat on the edges of their chairs as if to spring away from him at the least provocation. From an earlier visit made by the police, they’d learned of their nephew’s death via automobile accident; his parents in Rome had been informed; there the family were devastated; a funeral was even now being arranged.

  No tears were shed in the garden for Roberto’s unexpected passing. Salvatore thought this strange. Considering the length of time that Squali had lived with his aunt and uncle, it seemed to him that they would have come to consider him something of a son. But they had not, and some careful probing on his part turned up the reason.

  Roberto had not been a source of pride to his family. Indeed, just the opposite was the case. At fifteen years old and enterprising well beyond his years, he’d found easy money available in running a minor prostitution ring featuring the services of immigrant women from Africa. His parents had got him out of Rome one step ahead of being arrested not only for this but also for having enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh offered—at least to hear Roberto’s account of the interlude—by the twelve-year-old daughter of a family acquaintance. The parents of the violated girl agreed to a hefty financial settlement for her deflowering, and the public prosecutor had been cajoled into accepting an arrangement that guaranteed Roberto’s absence from the Eternal City well into subsequent decades. Hence, an arrest and a trial associated with either matter were avoided and familial disgrace had been buried by means of the boy’s removal to Lucca. There he’d remained for the past ten years.

  “He is not a bad boy,” Signora Medici avowed to Salvatore, less with passion than with the habit of repetition. “It is just that . . . for Roberto . . .” She glanced at her husband. It seemed a wary look.

  He went on. “Vuole una vita facile” was how the signore put it. And to Roberto, the easy life had been defined as working as little as possible since there were pickings aplenty in their society and he’d been determined from childhood to be ready with a basket whenever something was hanging low enough on the tree. When he worked at all, it was as a waiter in one fine restaurant or another, either in Lucca or in Pisa or occasionally in Firenze. Charming as he was, he never had trouble finding employment. Keeping it, however, had always been another matter.

  “We pray for him,” Signora Medici murmured. “Since he is fifteen years old, all of us pray that he will perhaps grow into a man like his father or like his brother.”

  The fact that Roberto had a brother was a subject worth exploring, but the topic was dispatched fairly quickly. Cristoforo Squali, as things turned out, was the blue-eyed boy in the family, an architetto in Rome, married three years, and producing a grandchild for his proud parents eleven months after the I dos were said. With another child on the way, he was everything Roberto was not, this Cristo. He’d never put a foot wrong since the day of his birth. While Roberto . . . ? Signora Medici crossed herself. “We pray for him,” she repeated. “Weekly novenas, his mother and I. But God has never heard our prayers.”

  Salvatore told them, then, about the location of their nephew’s accident. They appeared to know little enough about his doings in Tuscany, but there was a chance that his trip into the Apuan Alps would trigger in them a memory of a conversation with him, the casual mention on his part of a friend, an associate, or an acquaintance who lived there. He did not tell them that Roberto was involved in some way in the disappearance of the English girl that had been reported in the newspapers and on the television. Telling them that would put them all on the fast track to family secrecy, considering Roberto’s hushed-up brush with the law in Rome.

  Salvatore didn’t expect them to know much about what Roberto had been doing in the Apuan Alps. He was surprised, then, when Signora Medici and her husband looked at each other in what appeared to be consternation when he told them where their nephew’s car had been found. The air among them fairly crackled with tension as the signora repeated, “Le Alpi Apuane?” As she spoke, her husband’s face hardened on an expression that mixed loathing and fury equally.

  “Sì,” Salvatore said. If they had a carta stradale of Tuscany, he could show them approximately where their nephew’s car had been found.

  Signora Medici looked at her husband. Her glance seemed to ask him if they even wanted to know more at this point. They were worried about something, Salvatore concluded, perhaps trying to decide if they preferred to remain in ignorance about Roberto’s activities.

  Signor Medici made the decision for them both. He pushed himself to his feet and told Salvatore to come with him into the house. Salvatore followed him through an open doorway shielded from bugs by strips of plastic. This gave way into a large kitchen floored in well-scrubbed terracotta tiles. “Aspetti qui” told Salvatore that he was to wait, and the signore vanished through another doorway to a darkened part of the house while his wife went to the stove and from a shelf above it took a large Moka into which she began to spoon coffee. This seemed more something to do with her hands than an offer of hospitality since once she added water and put the Moka onto the flame of
the fornello, she promptly forgot all about it.

  The signore returned with a dog-eared road map of all of Tuscany. He spread it out upon a deeply dented chopping block that was a central feature of the kitchen. Salvatore studied it, trying to recall at what exact point the final turnoff appeared on the route to the accident site. With his finger he traced the route he and DI Lynley had taken. He got as far as the first turn they’d made off the main road when Signora Medici gave a whimper and her husband muttered a curse.

  “Che cosa sapete?” Salvatore asked them. “Dovete dirmi tutto.” For it was obvious to him that they did know more than they wished to say about the Apuan Alps. To convince them that they indeed had to tell him whatever they knew, he saw he had no choice in the matter and told them of Roberto’s possible involvement in a serious crime.

  “Ma lei, lei,” the signora murmured to her husband. She grabbed on to his arm as if for some kind of reassurance.

  “Chi?” Salvatore demanded. Who was this she to whom the signora referred?

  After an agonised glance between them, Signor Medici was the one to speak. She was their daughter, Domenica, who resided at a cloistered convent high in the Apuan Alps.

  “A nun?” Salvatore asked.

  No, she was not a nun, the signore told him. She was—and here the man’s lip curled with his disgust—una pazza, un’ imbecille, una—

  “No!” his wife cried. This was not true. She was not crazy, she was not an imbecile. She was, instead, just a simple girl who wanted and had been denied a life spent in the presence of God and a holy marriage to the Lord Jesus Christ. She wanted prayer. She wanted meditation. She wanted contemplation and silence, and if he did not understand that her deep love of her Catholic religion had created within their daughter a nature both massively spiritual and completely innocent—