Just One Evil Act

“Chocolate Pop-Tart and a fag.” She cocked her head at the sideboard and added, “Anything nutritious’ll probably put my system into shock.”

“Humour me,” he told her. “I don’t wish to eat alone.”

“Sir, please . . . I need you to . . .”

“I’m completely aware of that, Barbara,” he said steadily.

Reluctantly, she spooned herself some scrambled eggs. She added to this two rashers of bacon. She got into the spirit of things with four mushrooms and a piece of toast. He followed her lead and then joined her at the table.

She said with a nod to his newspapers, “How d’you read three bloody broadsheets every morning, for God’s sake?”

“I take the news from The Times and the editorials from The Guardian and The Independent.”

“Seeking balance in life?”

“I find it’s wise to do so. The overuse of adverbs in journalism these days is becoming something of a distraction, though. I don’t like to be told what to think, even surreptitiously.”

They locked eyes at this. She broke away first, scooping up some of her scrambled eggs and piling them up on a portion torn from her toast. She chewed quite a bit. Swallowing, however, did not appear easy for her.

Lynley said, “Before I make the call to Inspector Lo Bianco, Barbara . . . ?” He waited for her gaze to meet his. “Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything I need to know?”

She shook her head.

“You’re certain?” he said.

“Far ’s I know,” she told him.

So be it, he thought.

BELGRAVIA

LONDON

For the first time in her life, Barbara Havers cursed the fact that she had no language other than English. While it was true that she’d had moments of desire to learn a foreign tongue—most of them having to do with understanding what the cook at her local curry house was really yelling about the lamb rogan josh before he slopped it into a takeaway container—for the great majority of her life she’d had no need of one. She had a passport, but she’d never used it to go anywhere a foreign tongue was spoken. She’d never used it at all, in fact. She only had it on the off chance that a heretofore unknown Prince Charming might show up unexpectedly in her life and wish to take her on a luxury Mediterranean holiday in the sun.

But now, watching Lynley as he spoke to Chief Inspector Lo Bianco in Lucca, she tried to pick up anything she could. She listened hard for words she might recognise. She tried to read his face. From the words, she only picked up names: Azhar, Lorenzo Mura, Santa Zita—whoever the hell that was—and Fanucci. She thought she also heard Michelangelo Di Massimo mentioned as well as information, hospital, and factory, for some reason. Most of what she learned came from Lynley’s face, which grew graver as the conversation continued.

He finally said, “Chiaro, Salvatore. Grazie mille. Ciao,” which told her the conversation was ending.

Barbara felt only dread when he rang off, but the dread didn’t stop her. “What?” she asked. “What?”

“It appears to be E. coli,” he said.

Food contamination? she thought. Food? She said, “How the bloody hell did she die of food poisoning in this day and age? How does anyone die of food poisoning now?”

“Evidently, it was an enormously virulent strain, and the doctors didn’t recognise what it was because she reported being ill earlier due to her pregnancy. That’s what they initially thought they were still dealing with: a more serious version of morning sickness. Once they believed they had that sorted, they did other tests and those were all negative.”

“What sort of tests?”

“Cancers, colitis, other diseases. Colon and bowel. There was nothing, so they assumed she’d picked up a bug of some sort, as people do. They gave her a course of antibiotics as a precaution. And that’s what killed her.”

“Antibiotics killed her? But you said E. coli . . . ?”

“It was both. Evidently with E. coli—at least with this strain of it, as far as I can tell from what Salvatore said—antibiotics cause a toxin to be produced. Shiga, it’s called. It finishes off the kidneys. By the time the doctors realised from Angelina’s symptoms that her kidneys were going, it was too late to save her.”

“Bloody hell.” Barbara took this all in, and what seeped slowly into her consciousness was the fact that her body was relaxing for the first time in twelve hours and her mind was chanting, Thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God. Food poisoning ultimately leading to death, as unfortunate as it was, did not mean . . . what she did not want it to mean.

She said, “It’s over, then.”

Lynley gazed at her long before he said, “Unfortunately, it isn’t.”

“Why not?”

“No one else is ill.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it? They dodged the—”

“No one, Barbara. Anywhere. Not at Fattoria di Santa Zita—that’s the land Lorenzo Mura owns—not in any surrounding village, and not anywhere in Lucca. No one, as I said. Anywhere. Not in Tuscany. Nor in the rest of Italy. Which is one of the reasons the doctors didn’t recognise what they were dealing with immediately.”

“Should I be following this?”

“When E. coli’s involved, it’s generally referred to as a breakout. Do you see what I mean?”

“I see that this was an isolated case. But like I said, that’s good, isn’t it? That means . . .” And then she indeed saw what it meant, as clearly as she saw Lynley regarding her. Her mouth went dry. She said, “But they’d be checking everywhere for the source, right? They’d have to do that to prevent anyone else from getting infected. They’d be looking at everything Angelina ate and . . . Are there animals at this fattoria place?”

“Donkeys and cows, yes.”

“Could the E. coli have come from them? I mean, don’t animals pass this stuff on in some way? Aren’t we talking about . . . you know . . .”

“Evidently cattle are a reservoir for the bacteria, and it passes through their system. Yes. But I don’t believe there will be evidence of E. coli at Fattoria di Santa Zita, Barbara. Neither does Salvatore.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one else who ate there is ill. Hadiyyah, Lorenzo, even Azhar in the immediate days after Hadiyyah was found.”

“So maybe it’s . . . Does it incubate or something?”

“I’m vague on the details, but the point is someone there would have fallen ill by now.”

“Okay. Let’s say she went for a walk. Let’s say she got too near to a cow. Or let’s say she . . . P’rhaps she got it somewhere else. In town. At the marketplace. Visiting a friend. Picking something up off the road.” But even Barbara could hear the desperation in her voice, so she knew Lynley would clock it, as well.

“We go back to no one else being ill, Barbara. We go back to the strain itself.”

“What about the strain?”

“According to Salvatore”—with a nod at his mobile phone lying by his plate—“they’ve never seen anything like it. It’s to do with the virulence. A strain this virulent can take out an entire population before they identify its source. But that population falls ill quickly, in a matter of days. The health authorities become involved, and they