Just One Evil Act

now that one of the nails in Jesus’s feet and one of the thorns in his crown could easily contain them.

She rolled her thumbs along the pads of her fingers and wished for a cigarette. A sign on the wall opposite the dying Jesus seemed to forbid smoking, however. She couldn’t read the Italian but the large circle containing a cigarette with a red slash through it was universal.

After a minute or two, she got to her feet and began to pace. She gnawed on her thumbnail and wondered what was taking so long. When the door finally opened after a quarter of an hour, she half expected someone to come in and tell her the gaff was blown and her presence in Italy had not been confirmed—let alone sanctioned— by the London police. But when she swung round to face the door, it was Azhar who entered ahead of a guard.

In an instant Barbara realised two facts about her neighbour from London. First, she had never seen him unshaven, which he now was. Second, she had never seen him when he was not garbed in a crisp white dress shirt. Sleeves neatly rolled up in summer, sleeves rolled down and cuffs buttoned in winter, sometimes with a necktie, sometimes with a jacket, sometimes with a pullover, accompanying jeans or trousers . . . It was always the dress shirt, as definite to him as the way he signed his name.

Now, though, he wore prison garb. It was a boiler suit. It was a hideous shade of green. In combination with his unshaven face, with the dark patches of skin beneath his eyes, with his hollow expression of defeat, the sight of him made Barbara’s eyes prickle.

He was, she could tell, horrified to see her. He stopped just inside the door, so quickly that the guard accompanying him stumbled and then barked, “Avanti, avanti,” which Barbara took to mean Azhar was to get his arse inside. When he’d cleared the doorway, the guard stepped within and closed the door. Barbara gave a silent curse when she saw this, but she understood. She was not his solicitor, so she could claim no privilege.

Azhar spoke first. He did not sit. “You should not have come, Barbara,” he said futilely.

She said, “Sit,” and gestured to a chair. She told him the lie she had prepared. “This isn’t about you. I’ve been sent by the Met because of Hadiyyah.”

That, at least, prompted him to do as she said. He dropped into a chair and clasped his hands on the table. They were slender hands, lovely hands for a man. She’d always thought so, but now what she thought was that those hands would not serve him well in prison.

She said to him quietly, very nearly in a whisper, “And how could I not have come, Azhar, once I heard about this?” She gestured to the room, to the prison.

He matched the barely audible tone she employed. “You have done too much already to try to help me. There is no help for what has happened now.”

“Oh, really? Why’s that? Did you actually do what they think you’ve done? Did you manage to get Angelina to down a dose of E. coli? What did you put it in, her morning oatmeal?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Then, believe me, there’s help. But it’s time for you to start being straight with me. From A to Z. A’s the kidnapping, so let’s start there. I need to know everything.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

She shook her head bleakly. “That’s where you go wrong every time. You went wrong in December and you’ve gone wrong ever since. Why can’t you see that if you’re still lying about the kidnapping—”

“What do you mean? There’s nothing that I—”

“You wrote her a card, Azhar. Something for her kidnapper to hand to her so she would know for certain you were behind the snatching. You had him call her khushi and then give her a card, and in that card you told her to go with the man because he would bring her to you. Does this sound familiar?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She hissed, “Now, when in hell’re you going to stop lying to me? And how in hell d’you expect me to help you if you won’t start telling me the truth? About everything. DI Lynley gave me a copy of that card, by the way. And you can wager everything you’ve ever owned that the Lucca coppers are having the handwriting verified by an expert even as we speak. What the bloody hell were you thinking? Why did you take that risk?”

His reply was nearly inaudible. “I had to make sure she went with him. I told him to call her khushi, but how could I know that would be enough? I was desperate, Barbara. Can you not understand that? I had not seen my child in five months. What if she hadn’t gone with someone who merely called her khushi? What if instead she had told Angelina that a stranger had approached her in the market, trying to lure her beyond the walls? Angelina would have made it impossible for anyone to get near her after that. Hadiyyah would have been lost to me forever.”

“Well, that’s been taken care of, hasn’t it?”

He looked at her in horror. “I did not—”

“Do you see how it looks? How everything looks? You hire a detective to find her, then you kidnap her, then you come over here playing at Concerned Dad, and you’ve got tickets to Pakistan. Hadiyyah gets found, hugs and kisses all round, and in very short order Angelina dies. And what she dies of is a microorganism and you’re a bloody microbiologist. Are you following me? This is how a case is built, Azhar. And if you don’t start being straight with me about what you know and what you’ve done and how you’ve done it, then I can’t help you and, more important, I can’t help Hadiyyah. Full stop.”

“I did not,” he murmured brokenly.

“Yeah? Well, someone bloody did,” she whispered fiercely. “Lo Bianco’s onto a bloke passing you a petri dish of E. coli when you were in Berlin. Or posting it to you afterwards. Someone called von Lohmann, from Heidelberg. Meantime, The Source has dug up a woman from Glasgow who studies E. coli and who was also at this bloody conference. You were on a panel with the Heidelberg bloke, and for all I know you played hide-the-salami with the Glasgow woman when the sun went down, all the better to get her ready to hand over a vial of bacteria when you needed it.”

He flinched. He said nothing. His eyes were pained.

She sighed and said, “Sorry. Sorry. But you have to see how things look and how they’re going to look when all the pieces get put together. So if there’s anything—and I mean anything at all—that you haven’t told me, now’s the time.”

At least he didn’t respond at once. This, Barbara thought, was a good sign because it meant he was thinking instead of just reacting. She needed that from him. Thinking and remembering both. And, she knew, he would pass along the information she’d given him so that his solicitor might have the information as to how Lo Bianco was building his case. So all wasn’t lost, and she needed very much to keep things that way.

He said, “There is nothing more. You know it all now.”

“Have you any message for Hadiyyah, then? She’s where I intend to head next.”

He shook his head. He said, “She must not know,” and he lifted his fingers in a tired gesture that spoke of his whereabouts and his state of mind.

“Then I won’t tell her,” Barbara said. “Let’s hope Mura has the same intention.”

FATTORIA DI SANTA ZITA

TUSCANY

Mitchell Corsico had a map to assist with the location of Fattoria di Santa Zita. He even knew who Santa Zita was. During his downtime in Lucca—which, as he put it, there had been a hell of a lot of—he’d seen the highlights of the town, and Santa Zita’s corpse was one of them, encased in a glass coffin in the church of San Frediano, up on an altar, kitted out in her maid’s clothes, he reported. Just the stuff to enhance every kid’s nightmares. God only knew why Lorenzo Mura’s property was named after her.

Barbara had already decided that she couldn’t take Corsico with her to Lorenzo Mura’s home. She hadn’t the first clue what was going to happen when she showed her mug at his place, and she didn’t want a journalist there to exploit what went down. She thought at first that leaving Mitchell behind would be a problem, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. From their excursion to the prison, he had to devise a story to send to his editor and he had limited time in which to do it. He’d remain in Lucca while she went to the fattoria, he told her, but he would expect a report from her, and it had better be a full one.