Just One Evil Act

“Right. Okay. So d’you see Azhar giving von Lohmann the word in Berlin and von Lohmann fishing the E. coli out of his suitcase?”

Salvatore felt himself growing hot. She was either deliberately misunderstanding his words, or Marcella was not translating them correctly. He said, “Of course I do not mean Professor von Lohmann had the E. coli with him. But the seed of Professor Azhar’s interest was planted at that conference and once Hadiyyah was kidnapped by means of the London detective, then further plans were laid.”

Marcella’s translation arrested the sergeant’s cigarette on its way to her mouth. She said, “What’re you saying, exactly?”

He said, “I’m saying that what I have in my possession is proof from London that the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Upman was engineered there, not here. This detective in London who sends me the information? He would like me to think that a man called Michelangelo Di Massimo developed the scheme in Pisa, with the solitary assistance of Taymullah Azhar.”

“Hang on right there. There’s no bloody way—”

“But I have documents here that prove otherwise. Many records that—compared to the earlier records which I also have—have been altered. My point is this. Things are not simple and I am not stupid. Professor Azhar has been charged with murder. But I suspect this is not all he will be charged with.”

The sergeant twirled her cigarette, using her thumb and her index and middle fingers in a way that suggested she’d smoked for decades. She held her cigarette like a man, as well. Salvatore wondered vaguely if she was a lesbian. Then he wondered if he was stereotyping lesbians. Then he wondered why he was wondering anything at all about the curious detective.

She said, “Want to share what’s taking your head in that direction? It’s a bloody strange one, you ask me.”

Salvatore was careful with what he told her. He had banking information that contradicted earlier banking information, he explained. This information made things look as if someone somewhere was fixing evidence.

She said, “Sounds like nothing’s traceable to Professor Azhar, far as I can tell.”

“It’s true that a forensic computer specialist will have to sort through it all to follow the trails. But this can be done, and it will be, eventually.”

“‘Eventually’?” She thought about this, drawing her heavy eyebrows together. “Ah. You’re not on that case any longer, are you? Someone gave me that info.”

He waited while Marcella struggled with info. When she had it straightened out in her mind and the translation came, he said, “Murder is, I think you will agree, a more pressing issue to be dealt with now that the child is safe and several arrests have been made for her kidnapping. Everything will happen in due time. It is how we do things in Italy.”

She crushed out her cigarette. She did this vigorously, however, and some of the ashes spilled onto her trousers. She tried to rub them off, which made things worse. She said, “Bloody hell” and “Oh well,” which she followed with, “As to seeing Azhar. I’d like a few words with him. You c’n arrange that, right?”

He nodded. He would do that for her, he decided, as it was only right that the professor see the police liaison from his own country. But he had a feeling that this Sergeant Havers knew more about Taymullah Azhar than she was telling him. He reckoned Lynley would be able to help him out with the questions he had about this strange woman.

VICTORIA

LONDON

The truth of the matter was that Lynley not only didn’t know if anything could save Barbara Havers, but he also didn’t know if he wanted to go to the effort even to forestall what was looking more and more like the inevitable conclusion to this business.

He told himself initially that the maddening woman didn’t really belong in police work anyway. She couldn’t cope with authority. She had a chip on her shoulder the size of a military tank. She had appalling personal habits. She was often dazzlingly unprofessional and not only in her manner of dress. She had a good mind, but half the time she didn’t use it. And half of the half when she did use her mind, it led her completely astray. As it had done now.

And yet. When she was on, she was on and she gave the job her life’s blood. She was fearless when it came to challenging an opinion with which she didn’t agree, and she never put the possibility of promotion ahead of her commitment to a case. She might argue and she might bite into a theory that she believed in like a pit bull with its jaws locked on a piece of meat. But her ability to confront the sorts of people she shouldn’t begin to be able to confront set her apart from every other officer he’d worked with. She didn’t pull a forelock in anyone’s presence. That was the sort of officer one wanted on one’s team.

And then, there was the not small matter of her having saved his life. That act of hers would always hang between them. She never brought it up and he knew she never would. But he also knew he would never forget it.

So he ended up deciding that he had no real choice. He had to give it a go and try to save the bloody woman from herself. The only way he saw to do this was to prove she was right about everything regarding Angelina Upman’s death.

It would be tough going, and he brought Winston Nkata in on the process. Nkata would check into everyone associated with Angelina Upman in London: their whereabouts during the time of her illness and death in Tuscany as well as their associates in London and the unlikely possibility of their getting their hands on E. coli. He was to start with Esteban Castro—Angelina’s erstwhile lover—and he was to include the man’s wife, along with Angelina’s own relatives: Bathsheba Ward and her parents and Hugo Ward as well. No matter what name he came up with, Lynley told him, he was to follow that name and to look for connections. In the meantime, he himself would head to Azhar’s lab at University College in order to double-check St. James’s work.

Winston looked doubtful about the entire procedure, but he said he would get on it. “But you don’ think any of this lot’s involved, do you?” he asked. “Seems to me the E. coli bit’s asking for a specialist.”

“Or someone who knows a specialist,” Lynley told him. He sighed and added, “God knows, Winston. We’re flying in the dark by our trouser seats.”

Nkata smiled. “You sound like Barb.”

“God forbid,” Lynley said. He went on his way. He was in the car heading to Bloomsbury when Salvatore Lo Bianco rang him from Lucca. The inspector’s opening remark of “Who is this extraordinary woman that Scotland Yard has sent over, Ispettore?” did nothing to assure him that Barbara was at least behaving herself in Italy. There was a small mercy in the fact that Lo Bianco did not wait for an immediate answer. Instead he gave Lynley the information he needed to fashion a response that didn’t condemn Barbara at once.

“She is odd for a liaison officer,” Salvatore told him, “as she speaks no Italian. Why did they not send you again?”

Lynley went with the liaison officer part. Unfortunately, he’d not been available this time round, he explained. He wasn’t, in fact, in the loop as to what Sergeant Havers was doing in Tuscany. Could Salvatore bring him into the picture?

Thus he learned that Havers was presenting herself as having been sent to Italy to deal with Hadiyyah Upman’s situation. Thus he also learned that Taymullah Azhar not only was indagato but also was being held in prison while under investigation for murder. Things were moving rapidly.

Salvatore told him about the conflict between the information he’d received from London and his own information. On the one hand, he said, he was in possession of an early set of Michelangelo Di Massimo’s bank records, and on the other hand, London had sent him masses of data that, upon examination and comparison to Michelangelo’s bank records a second, later time, showed that someone had doctored the Pisan’s account.

“They’ve got someone over here hacking into accounts and creating documents,” Lynley told him. “Everything is suspect at this point, Salvatore. Your best course is to have a computer expert at your end work out how they’re diddling with things. We could, naturally, try for a court order here to get the banks and the phone companies to delve into their backup systems in order to get our hands on the original records. But that will take time, and it’s iffy anyway.”