Just One Evil Act

made. So to have a police presence from England on hand did not surprise him. He merely hadn’t expected that person to appear at the questura so quickly.

It wasn’t DI Lynley, which was unfortunate. Not only had Salvatore liked the Englishman, it had also been convenient that Lynley spoke quite decent Italian. Indeed, he found it decidedly odd that the Metropolitan police would send someone to Lucca who didn’t speak Italian. But when Aldo Greco rang him and gave him her name and her details—including her lack of Italian—he agreed to see her. Greco assured him that the officer would bring a translator with her. Her companion—an English cowboy, Greco said—apparently had several contacts in the town, and one of them would see to it that Sergeant Havers was accompanied by a native speaker.

Salvatore hadn’t thought much about what an English woman detective might look like, so he wasn’t prepared for the woman who came into his office some two hours after the phone call from Greco. When he saw her, he reflected on the fact that, perhaps, he’d been too influenced over the years by British television dramas dubbed into Italian. He’d anticipated, perhaps, someone along the lines of one distinguished and titled actress or another, a little hard round the edges but otherwise leggy, fashionably put together, and attractive. What walked into his office, however, was the antithesis of all this, save for the hard-round-the-edges part. She was short, stout, and garbed in desperately wrinkled beige linen trousers, red trainers, and a partially untucked navy-blue tank top that hung from her plump shoulders. Her hair looked as if she’d put herself into the hands of her gardener who’d done double duty while trimming the hedges outside of her house. Her skin was beautiful—the British were served well by their damp climate, he thought—but it was shiny with perspiration.

Accompanied by a bookish-looking woman with very large spectacles and very gelled hair, the English detective strode across the office to his desk with so much confidence and so much un-Italian disregard for her personal appearance that, grudgingly, he had to admire her. She held out a hand, which he discovered was damp. “DS Barbara Havers,” she said. “You don’t speak English. Right. Well. This is Marcella Lapaglia, and I’ll be square with you: Marcella’s the partner of a bloke called Andrea Roselli. He’s a journalist from Pisa, but she’s not going to give him any information unless you say it’s fine by you. She’s here to translate, and I’m paying her for it, and luckily she needs the money more than she needs Andrea’s approval at the moment.”

Salvatore listened to this stream of babble and caught a word here and there. Marcella did a rapid translation. Salvatore didn’t like it one bit that this other woman was the lover of Andrea Roselli, and when he said this directly, Marcella told the English detective. They went back and forth a bit until he said, “Come? Come?” impatiently and Marcella paused to translate for him.

“She’s a professional translator” were the English detective’s words via Marcella. “She knows how fast her career goes down the toilet if she spreads information she’s not meant to spread.”

“This had better be the case,” Salvatore said directly to Marcella.

“Certamente,” she told him evenly.

“I work with DI Lynley in London,” DS Barbara Havers told him. “So I’m fairly well in the loop of what’s been happening over here. Mostly I’m here to deal with the kid—the professor’s daughter—and it’ll help me do that if I know exactly what you’ve got on Azhar and how likely it is that he’ll go to trial at some point. She’s going to have questions—Hadiyyah, the kid—and I’ll need to work out what to tell her. You c’n help me with that. What d’you have on Azhar—the professor—if you don’t mind my asking? I mean, I know he’s going down for murder—Mr. Greco told me—and I know about his job back in London and the conference in Berlin he attended and what Hadiyyah’s mother died of, as well. But . . . well, let’s be honest, Inspector Lo Bianco, far as I know at the moment unless you’ve got more than you’re saying, what you’ve got on him seems iffy at best, hardly the stuff on which arrests are made and charges drawn. So it seems to me, with your approval, I c’n tell Hadiyyah her dad’s going to be home soon enough. That is, like I say, unless there’s something here I don’t know about yet.”

Salvatore heard the translation of all this, but he kept his gaze fixed on the detective sergeant, who kept her gaze fixed on him as well. Most people, he thought, would drop their eyes at some point or at least shift them to take in the details of his office, such as they were. All she did was finger the dirty shoelace on her red trainer, whose encased foot she held casually on one of her knees. When Marcella had reported all of the sergeant’s words, Salvatore said carefully, “The investigation is still ongoing. And, as you must know, Sergeant, things are done differently here in Italy.”

“What I know is you’ve got less than circumstantial evidence. You’ve got a string of coincidences that make me wonder why Professor Azhar’s behind bars at all. But let’s not go there for the moment. I’m going to want to see him. You’ll need to arrange that.”

The order made Salvatore prickly. Really, she was rather incredible, making such a request, considering she was in Italy for the purpose of seeing to the welfare of Hadiyyah Upman. “For what reason do you ask to see him?” he enquired.

“Because he’s Hadiyyah Upman’s father, and Hadiyyah’s going to want to know where he is, how he is, and what’s going on. That’s only natural, as I expect you know.”

“His fatherhood is something unproven,” Salvatore pointed out. He was glad to see that his comment made her bristle once she heard Marcella’s translation of it.

“Right. Yes. Well. Whatever. You score a point on that one, don’t you. But a blood test will sort everything out soon enough. Look, for his part, he’s going to want to know where she is and what’s happening to her, and I want to be able to tell him that. Now you and I know that you c’n arrange it. I’d like you to do so.” She waited while Marcella translated. He was about to reply when she added, “You c’n think of it all as a merciful concession. Because . . . well, let me be frank. You do look like a merciful sort of bloke.” Before he could reply to this astonishing remark, she looked round and said, “D’you smoke, by the way, Inspector? Because I could do with a fag but I don’t want to offend.”

Salvatore emptied the ashtray he kept on his desk and handed it to her. She said, “Ta,” and began to dig round in a massive shoulder bag she’d set on the floor. She muttered and damned this and bloody helled that— these words he knew—and finally he reached in his jacket for his own cigarettes and handed them to her. “Ecco,” he said. To which she replied, “See? I said you looked like a merciful bloke.” And then she smiled. He was taken aback. She was, as an object of femininity, quite appalling, but she had an extraordinarily lovely smile and, unlike what he’d come to think of as the English predilection for doing nothing to improve the state of their dentition, she also seemed to care about her teeth, which were very straight, very white, and very nice. Before he knew what he was doing, he smiled back. She handed the cigarettes back to him, he took one, offered one to Marcella, and they all lit up.

She said, “C’n I be honest with you, Chief Inspector Lo Bianco?”

“Salvatore,” he said. And when she looked surprised, he said in English, “Not so long,” and he smiled.

“Barbara, then,” she replied. “It’s shorter as well.” She inhaled in a masculine fashion and seemed to let the smoke settle into her blood before she said, “So c’n I be honest, Salvatore?” And when he nodded at Marcella’s translation, “From what I c’n tell, you’re building a case against Taymullah Azhar. But c’n you put E. coli into his hands?”

“The conference in Berlin—”

“I know about Berlin. So he was at a conference? What difference does it make?”

“None at all till you look into the conference and discover that he was on a panel along with a scientist from Heidelberg. Friedrich von Lohmann, he’s called, this man. There, at the university in Heidelberg, he studies E. coli in a laboratory.”

Barbara Havers nodded, her eyes narrowing behind the smoke from her cigarette. “All right,” she said. “The panel bit? I didn’t know that. But ’f you ask me, it’s just coincidence. You lot can’t go into court with that, can you?”

“Someone has gone to Germany to interview this man,” Salvatore told her. “And you and I know that it would not be impossible at a conference of this kind for one scientist to ask another for a strain of bacteria to look at for some reason.”

“Like asking to see his vacation snaps?” she asked with a laugh.

“No,” he said. “But it would not be difficult for him to create a reason that he needed this bacteria, would it: the project of a graduate student whose work he is supervising, his own shift in interest perhaps. These are merely two examples he could have used with the Heidelberg man.”

“But bloody hell, Inspector . . . I mean, Salvatore, you can’t think these blokes carry samples round with them! What d’you have? Azhar giving Mr. Heidelberg—What was his name again?”

“Von Lohmann.”