Just One Evil Act

16 May

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Salvatore Lo Bianco inspected his face in the bathroom mirror. The bruises were yellowing up nicely. He looked less beaten up and more like he was recovering from a bout with jaundice. In a matter of days, he would be able to see Bianca and Marco once again. This was good as his mamma was not happy about being denied the company of her favourite nipoti.

He went to his car when he left the tower. It was a brisk walk in the fine spring air, and he stopped for caffe and a pastry on his way. He ate and drank quickly. He bought a copy of Prima Voce from the news vendor in Piazza dei Cocomeri. He glanced at its headline and its cover story. So far, he saw, Piero Fanucci hadn’t let the E. coli cat out of the bag.

Relieved, he drove to Fattoria di Santa Zita, beneath an azure sky whose cloudlessness promised a day of heat on the alluvial plain where Lucca lay. Above in the hills, the trees offered great banks of shade that would keep the temperatures more pleasant, and along the dusty lane onto Lorenzo Mura’s property, the tree branches formed a pleasing, leafy tunnel. When he emerged from it, he parked near Mura’s winery. He heard voices from within the ancient stone structure. He ducked beneath the arbour’s drapery of wisteria and entered the shadowy place, where the scent of fermentation was like a fine perfume that tinctured the air.

Lorenzo Mura and a younger foreign-looking man were beyond the tasting room and inside the bottling room. They were examining a sheaf of labels, prefatory to placing them on two or three score bottles. Chianti Santa Zita, the labels announced, but Mura didn’t seem pleased with the look of them. He was frowning as he spoke. The younger man was nodding.

Salvatore cleared his throat. They looked up. Did the port wine birthmark that marred Mura’s otherwise handsome face grow darker? It looked so to Salvatore.

“’Giorno,” he said. He’d heard them talking and followed the sound of their voices, he explained. He hoped that he wasn’t interfering.

Of course, he was interfering, but Lorenzo Mura didn’t say that. Instead he spoke again to the younger man, whose pale skin and fair hair marked him as either English or, more likely, a Scandinavian who, like so many of his fellows, spoke Italian along with another two or three useful languages. The younger man—no name given and none required, Salvatore thought—listened and disappeared into the winery’s depths. For his part, Mura gestured to an open bottle near the labelling machine. Vorrebbe del vino? Hardly, Salvatore thought. It was far too early in the day for him to sip Chianti, appreciatively or otherwise. But grazie mille, all the same.

Lorenzo apparently felt no such compunction about the hour. He’d been imbibing and so had his assistant. Two glasses stood nearby, still half-filled with wine. He picked up one of them and drained it. Then he said dully, “She’s dead. Our child dies with her. You do nothing. Why do you come?”

“Signor Mura,” Salvatore said, “we would have these things move quickly but they can only move as fast as the process itself allows.”

“And this means . . . ? What?”

“This means that a case must be built. One builds it first and then moves to finish it with an arrest afterwards.”

“She dies, she’s buried, and nothing happens,” Mura said. “And from this you tell me a ‘case’ is being built. I come to you directly when she dies. I tell you this is no natural death. But you send me away. So why are you here?”

“I come to ask if you will allow Hadiyyah Upman to reside with you here at the fattoria until other arrangements can be made with her family in London.”

Mura’s head jerked. “What does this mean?”

“That I am in the midst of building a case. And when I have built it—which I must do with care—I will take the next step and I will not hesitate. But arrangements need to be made in advance and I have come to you in order to make them.”

Mura studied his face as if trying to sift for truth or lie. Who could blame him? Salvatore thought. Nine times out of ten in the country and particularly in Tuscany hadn’t it happened that an arrest was made first and then facts were pounded into shape to fit the case afterwards? This was especially the situation when a public minister like Piero Fanucci had a range of vision that was limited to a single suspect from the moment it was decided that a crime had occurred. Mura would know that, and he would wonder why no one was arresting anyone for anything in the matter of the deaths of his lover and their child.

Salvatore said to Mura, “The fact of murder has to be established in a death such as that of your Angelina. This has been made more difficult because she was ill in the weeks leading up to her death. We now know what caused her to die—”

Mura took a step towards him, reaching out. Salvatore held up a hand to stop him.

“—but this is something we are not speaking of yet.”

“He did this. I knew it.”

“Time will tell.”

“How much time?”

“This is something we cannot know. But we move forward, keeping what we learn close to our hearts. Still, that I have come to ask you about arrangements of the care of Hadiyyah . . . I would hope that this tells you how near to the end we are.”

“He came to us, he built her trust, and when he had it . . . somehow he did this. You know it.”

“We are speaking today, the professor and I. We have already spoken and we will also speak tomorrow. Nothing, Signor Mura, is being left unturned or going unnoticed. I assure you of that.” Salvatore inclined his head towards the door. He said in an altogether different tone, “You raise asini, no? This I have learned from the London detective. Will you show them to me?”

Mura’s face grew cloudy. “For what reason?”

Salvatore smiled. “For the reason of purchase. I have two children who would love such an animal to keep as a pet in the countryside where I have a small cottage. They are pets, vero?, these animals you breed? Or if they are not, they are gentle enough to become pets, no?”

“Certo,” Lorenzo Mura said.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

In the end, Salvatore had accomplished his mission. The sight of Lorenzo Mura’s donkeys in the olive orchard had prompted his request to talk to someone who had bought one of the docile-seeming creatures most recently so that he could reassure himself that they were gentle enough to be his children’s pet at the family’s nonexistent cottage in the country. Mura had given him the name of his most recent customer, and Salvatore had taken matters from there.

A call upon the man had eliminated him as a possible source of the E. coli that had killed Angelina Upman. Not because there would have been no bacteria on his farmland near Valpromaro but because he confirmed during their conversation that he had indeed recently purchased a foal from Signor Mura and that he had paid in cash so as to allow Signor Mura to avoid one of the myriad ways in which Italians were taxed. He gave the date of his purchase of the animal, which coincided perfectly with the presence of the man that Ispettore Lynley had reported passing an envelope of something to Mura at the fattoria.

When he returned to the questura, it was to gather more information from Ottavia Schwartz and Giorgio Simione, still slogging their way through the congregation of scientists who’d met in Berlin in April. They’d located a scientist from the University of Glasgow who studied E. coli, Ottavia reported. It was likely that there would be others if the ispettore wished them to