Just One Evil Act

“I expect it comes down to my not quite trusting you.”

“Christ. What more do I sodding have to tell you?”

“Why you’re so hot to have this story hit the paper for a start.”

“Because they should be telling their own papers about it and they’re not. They’re not warning anyone. They’re not looking for the source.”

“Uh . . . That’s where you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. You and I both know why the professor’s been stuck in the questura. This conversation’s gone back to where it started. He was there yesterday. Chances are very good he’ll be there today, and ’f you ask me, there’s a pretty good chance they’re not talking to him about how he likes the weather in Tuscany and the farro soup in Lucca. Come on, Barb. I did a little digging on our good professor: the ins, the outs, and the whereabouts. He was rubbing elbows with his fellow bacteria lovers just last month. Berlin, this was. Now, if I know that—because it wasn’t exactly a top secret, eyes-only confab, Barb—the cops know that. They find someone among that crowd who’s studying E. coli and it’s one hell of a very short trip from that information to someone passing along a petri dish of that stuff to Azhar for use on his lover.”

“Mitchell. Are you listening to me?”

“Okay. His former lover, if that’s where I’ve gone wrong.”

“Stop it,” she said. “Have you been listening? This is a story in which the Italian health services and the Italian police—”

“Barb, you’re the one not listening. Uncle Mitchell here has colleagues there. Where you are. In London. And those colleagues have sources elsewhere, even in Berlin. And their sources in Berlin have easy access to that conference of bacteria bigwigs. And what do you think they’ve uncovered for me? In twenty-four hours, Barb, so you can rest bloody well assured that the Italian coppers will be right behind them.”

Barbara’s throat was so tight that she could barely get the word out. “What?”

“We’ve got a woman from University of Glasgow who’s a major player in the E. coli field. We’ve got a bloke from University of Heidelberg who’s right behind her. Both of them have serious operations going in laboratories on their home patches. And both of them were at the conference. You can connect the dots on that one if you want to.”

No, Barbara thought. No, no, no.

She said, and she tried to sound determined, “You’re heading in the wrong direction. This is a woman who had more than one lover at a time. She had Azhar and another bloke while she was living with Azhar here in London. And then she had Lorenzo Mura as well. Three lovers at once. She left Azhar for Lorenzo Mura and I’m telling you that it’s a fairly sure thing she picked up someone over there once the fires burnt low with Mura. That’s who she was.”

“You’re slithering all over the map, Barb. You can’t be trying to tell me this bird had a former lover with access to E. coli and a current lover with access as well. How d’you expect that ship to get out of port? And you’re contradicting yourself anyway. This is either a grand Italian cover-up or it’s cold-blooded murder, but it isn’t both.”

She was as out of ideas as she was out of steam. She was reduced to saying the one thing she knew had no chance at all of winning him to her thoughts. She said, “Mitchell, please.”

He said pleasantly, “At the end of the day, this is going to be a very big story, so I s’pose I have to thank you, Barb. I give it another twenty-four hours before they arrest him. They call that indagato here. The coppers turn their eyes on you as the principal suspect and the news goes out and you’re indagato. Taking his passport was the first step. That’s the second. So you put me on to a very big story, Barb. Rod might even increase my expense account to include a plate of spaghetti Bolognese.”

“You’ll destroy him if you start speculating about him in the press. You know that, right? You’ve already done the Love Rat Dad piece. Wasn’t that enough? You’ve got nothing but circumstantial rubbish to build a story on.”

“True enough,” he said. “But circumstantial rubbish is our bread and butter. You knew that when you brought me on board.”

VICTORIA

LONDON

Barbara forced herself to eat. She even went for something with more nutritional validity than her usual fare. In place of a strawberry Pop-Tart, she opted for a soft-boiled egg and brown toast. She gave in to jam, but that was it. She felt virtuous for five minutes until she sicked up the entire mess.

Luckily that happened before she left Chalk Farm for the Met. She was forced to change her tee-shirt and scrub her teeth and mouth three times. But none of that resulted in her being late for work, which she reckoned counted in her favour.

She tried not to smoke en route. She failed. She tried to divert her mind with chat from Radio 4. She failed. Twice she came close to finding herself on the responsibility end of a roadway crash. She self-talked and tried to get her breath even and her heart beating normally. She failed there as well.

She had two fags in the underground car park, the first to still her nerves and the second to build her courage. What she was attempting to come to terms with was having saved Azhar from a kidnapping charge only to have him charged with murder. In the realm of pyrrhic victories, she reckoned she’d just been crowned its bloody empress.

And where was Hadiyyah? What in God’s name had been done with Hadiyyah if Azhar was spending hours on the grill in gaol?

She’d rung his mobile: twice before she left her bungalow in Chalk Farm, once on her way to Victoria Street, and a final time in the underground car park. No reply told her he was probably back at the questura, as Mitch had predicted. What she couldn’t understand was why he had not rung to tell her what was going on.

She couldn’t work out what this meant except that he didn’t want her to know he was being questioned in the first place. He’d already deceived her about his participation in Hadiyyah’s kidnapping. It wasn’t inconceivable that he’d not wanted her to know he was being questioned about Angelina’s death.

What she didn’t want to toss round in her mind was whether she ought to be concluding that he was involved. Instead, she concentrated on Hadiyyah and on the state of fear and confusion the little girl had to be in. Her young life was in shambles. In six short months, she’d gone through more than most children endure in a lifetime. After being snatched from her father and taken to Italy, after being kidnapped and held for days at an obscure location in the Italian Alps, after losing her mother . . . now her father was under suspicion for murder? How was she to navigate this? How was she to navigate it alone?

When Barbara reached her desk, she checked for messages. She saw that she was under the watchful eye of John Stewart as usual, but that couldn’t be helped. Finding nothing that gave her a clue about Italy and Azhar, she went to see Detective Superintendent Ardery. There was only one way to move forward, she reckoned, and she was going to need Ardery’s blessing to do it.

She rang Azhar’s mobile a final time. She even rang the pensione where he was staying, only to discover that the woman who picked up the call spoke not a single word of English. She was great with her Italian, though. Once she heard Barbara’s voice and Taymullah Azhar, she was off like a jackrabbit, flooding the airwaves with a recitation that could have been anything from a recipe for minestrone to a declamation on the state of the world. Who bloody knew? Barbara finally rang off on her and then there was nothing for it but to go in search of Superintendent Ardery.

She thought of taking DI Lynley with her, in the hope that he might be able to soften up the superintendent with a display of careful reasoning. However, not only was Lynley not yet in for the day—why the bloody hell not? she wondered—but she also had to admit to herself that she couldn’t rely upon him to be in her corner. Too much water had passed under that bridge in the past few weeks.

When Dorothea Harriman turned from her keyboard at the sound of her name, Barbara clocked her expression immediately. Dee’s gaze took in the tee-shirt Barbara had quickly donned after sicking up her breakfast, and Barbara could tell that, while Dee might have been mildly amused by its declaration of Heavily Medicated for Your Safety, chances were very good that Isabelle Ardery was not going to be. Barbara