Just One Evil Act

Later, after a shared pudding of something called chocolate death gateau followed by coffee, they left the place. Nothing had been resolved between them and yet the sense of having moved forward was something that Lynley couldn’t ignore. They walked to her car arm in arm, and before she unlocked it and prepared to drive away, she stepped easily and naturally into his arms.

Just as easily, he kissed her. Just as easily, her lips parted to his and the kiss lingered. He felt a tremendous desire for her: partly the animal lust that drove their species, partly spiritual longing that happened when a soul recognised the immortal worth of another soul.

The inn has rooms, he wanted to say. Climb those stairs with me, Daidre, and come to bed.

Instead he said nothing but “Good night, dear friend.”

“Good night, dear Tommy” was her reply.

15 May

CHALK FARM

LONDON

Barbara’s mobile rang as she was showering, trying to wash off not only her feeling of dread but also the stench of cigarette smoke. Her nerves had been raw for more than forty-eight hours now, and only one fag after another had done anything to calm them. She’d gone through four packets of Players and as a result her lungs were making her feel like a woman being tried for witchcraft: A huge stone the approximate size of the Isle of Man sat on her chest, demanding a confession of her misdeeds.

When the mobile rang, she leapt from the shower. She grabbed it, it slipped out of her fingers, and she watched in horror as it launched towards the tiled floor, where it lost its battery and whoever had been ringing her. She cursed, grabbed a towel, rescued the mobile, and put it back together. She looked to see who the caller had been. She recognised Mitchell Corsico’s number. She rang him back at once, sitting on the loo and dripping water onto the floor.

“What’ve you got?” she asked.

“Good morning to you too” was his reply. “Or I s’pose I should say bone jorno.”

“You’re in Italy?” she asked. Thank God. The next step was moulding the story he would write.

“Let’s put it this way: Il grande formaggio—that would be Rodney Aronson over in Fleet Street, by the way—wasn’t exactly chuffed to cough up the funds to get me here, so my expense account is large enough for one slice of focaccia and a cup of espresso each day. I have to sleep on a park bench—praise God there’re dozens of them up on the city wall, at least—unless I spring for a hotel room myself. But other than that, yeah, I’m in Italy, Barb.”

“And?” she said.

“And the good professor spent part of yesterday at the local nick. They call it a questura here, by the way. He was there with his solicitor in the afternoon, and they left for dinner, which made me think things might not be what they seemed. But then he was back with the same bloke in tow, and in they went for another few hours. I tried to have a word with him in the afters, but he wasn’t giving.”

“What about Hadiyyah?” Barbara asked him anxiously.

“Who?”

“His daughter, Mitchell. The one who was kidnapped? Where is she? What’s happened to her? He can’t have left her all alone for a day in some hotel room while he talked to the cops.”

“P’rhaps not. But the way things are looking, Barb, he sure as hell did something and he surer as hell doesn’t want to have a chat about it with me. No one has a whisper about E. coli, by the way. There’s four journalists I’ve run into—these’re Italians as I’m the only Brit mad enough to be here—and they speak good English and they haven’t heard a word about E. coli. So I’m going to lay something out for you here. This E. coli business: truth or lie? I mean, I’ve had a think in the last twenty-four, and it seems to me you’re not above sending your best mate Mitchell on a wild-goose chase for your own reasons. You’re not doing that, are you? Better reassure me or things won’t look good for you.”

“Aside from all of that being rubbish on a scone, you’ve already printed those pictures of me, Mitchell. What else can you do?”

“Print them up with the dates on them this time round, darling. Send them off to your guv and see what happens next. Hey, you and I know you’ve been working this situation from every wrong angle because you and the professor—”

“Don’t bloody go there,” she said. It was bad enough she’d had to go there with Lynley. She had no intention of entertaining her supposed love for Azhar as a subject with Mitch Corsico. “The E. coli story is solid. I told you that much. I had it from DI Lynley. I was sitting right at his dining room table when he got it and he got it directly from Italy from a bloke called Lo Bianco. Chief Inspector Salvatore Lo Bianco. He’s the cop who—”

“Yeah, yeah. I know who he is. Pulled from the kidnapping case for incompetence, Barb. Did Lynley tell you that? I reckon not, eh? So this Lo Bianco drops a fanciful word about E. coli as a bit of you-know-what.”

“Revenge for being pulled from the kidnapping case? A way to muddy the waters? Don’t be stupid. And the E. coli business has nothing to do with the kidnapping anyway. It’s a separate issue. The Italians don’t want it hitting the press. That’s your story so bloody go after it. You can’t think Azhar’s been questioned for hours because of a kidnapping that everyone knows he had no part in. They have someone under arrest for the kidnapping, for the love of God. Far as I know, they’ve got two blokes under arrest for it. This is another issue and the last thing the Italians want is for the information to get out. It panics people. No one buys Italian. Their exports get held for testing and the veg rots in port and the fruit goes soft. ’F they pin the E. coli business on a single person—which, believe me, they’re intent on doing come hell or you-know-what—they don’t have to worry. They call it murder and Bob’s the rest of it. That’s your story.” So bloody well write it, she thought, so that the Italian press would pick up on it, run with it, and batter the cops till the real source of the E. coli was located. Because the one thing she could and would absolutely bet her life on was that Azhar had nothing to do with Angelina Upman’s death.

On his end of the call, Mitch Corsico was acting thoughtful. He hadn’t got to where he was without being careful with his stories. He might be employed by a deplorable rag that was more suitable for lining rubbish bins than it was for printing valuable information, but he didn’t intend to spend his entire career at The Source, so he had a reputation for accuracy that he had to maintain. He said, “Seems to me you’re not thinking this through. Far ’s I can tell, there’s not a hint of pasta-eating lads and lasses dropping like flies because of some mass food poisoning over here unless the health officials for the whole effing country’re in on a cover-up, which, you ask me, isn’t bloody likely. So are you trying to suggest the Upman woman dipped into a plate of steaming E. coli on her own?”

“Who knows how high the cover-up goes? For all we know, there are other E. coli victims and no one is talking about them.”

“Bollocks. There’ll be laws about that. Reporting a potential epidemic or something. Like when someone shows up in casualty coughing blood and bloody-hell-we’ve-got-a-case-of-TB-on-our-hands. They don’t let that go. They wouldn’t let this go.”

Barbara jammed her fingers into her wet hair. She looked round for her fags, didn’t see them, realised that she hadn’t brought them into the bathroom, remembered that she’d had a shower primarily to wash the stench of them off her, and wanted one anyway.

She said, “Mitchell? Will you listen to me? Or at least to yourself? One way or another you’ve got a story, so why the hell don’t you bloody write it?”