Just One Evil Act

She sat in a straight-backed chair to watch along with the others as Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar talked about their missing child. The camera showed Angelina’s exhausted face. The camera showed Azhar. The camera dollied back to show where they sat at the table beneath the arbour in the company of the man with the wart-infested face. He talked with such velocity and such passion that it was difficult to notice anything save him. The other two people, the table, the background . . . it all faded away as the man spat and roared.

Which, Barbara realised with a bolt of understanding, was why the film had played on television, had been given to Hadiyyah, had been watched and watched without a single person involved seeing what was in front of them the entire time.

“Oh my God,” she murmured.

She felt dazed and her mind began to spin as she tried to come up with a next step and then another and then a third, all of which could evolve into a plan. Lynley, she knew, would not help her now. That left only one possibility.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Thus, Mitchell Corsico was the proverbial port in the storm that was brewing. He’d been in Italy long enough to acquire the sort of sources Barbara needed now, but she knew he was going to want a deal. He wouldn’t hand anything over to her unless he had his picture of Hadiyyah. So she rang his mobile and she prepared herself for a round of bargaining with the bloke.

“Where are you?” she asked him. “We need to talk.”

“Your lucky day,” he told her. He was just outside in the piazza at that very moment, enjoying a caffe and a brioche as he waited for Barb to come to her senses in the matter of Hadiyyah Upman. He’d been working on the story, by the way. It was a real tearjerker. Rodney Aronson was going to love it. Page one guaranteed.

Barbara said sourly, “You’re the confident one, aren’t you?”

“In this business, you’d better be confident. ’Sides, one gets to know the scent of desperation.”

“Whose?”

“Oh, I wager you know.”

She told him to stay where he was as she was coming out to meet him. She found him as promised: beneath an umbrella at a cafe table across from the pensione. He’d finished his coffee and pastry, and he was busily tapping away at his laptop. His remark of “Christ, I’m brilliant” as she reached him told her he was working on his Hadiyyah story.

She took from her bag the school photo of Hadiyyah that she had showed Aldo Greco on the previous day. She laid it on the table, but she didn’t sit.

Mitch looked at the photo and then at her. “And this is . . . ?”

“What you want.”

“Uh . . . no.” He pushed it back to her and went on typing. “If I’m manufacturing horse dung here”—with a gesture at his laptop—“for the delectation of the great UK public, then something about the tale has to be genuine and what that something is going to be is a picture of the kid here in Italy.”

“Mitch, listen—”

“You listen, Barb. F’r all Rod knows I’m here having the holiday of a lifetime although God knows why I’d choose Lucca to have it in since its after-dinner nightlife consists of hundreds of Italians on bikes, in trainers, or with pushchairs circling the town on that wall like crows contemplating fresh roadkill. But he doesn’t know that, does he? Far as he’s concerned, Lucca’s Italy’s answer to Miami Beach. I need something that shows him I’m hot on the trail of whatever. Now, from what I can tell, you need to be hot on the trail of whatever, so let’s cooperate with each other. We’ll start with a picture of the kid—showing she’s in goddamn Italy, by the way—and we’ll go from there.”

Barbara could see that further argument would get her nowhere. She took back the photo of Hadiyyah and struck the deal. She’d get him that picture herself as there was no way in hell she ever wanted it getting back to Azhar that she’d allowed a tabloid journalist to photograph his daughter. She’d pose Hadiyyah at the window of the breakfast room, which looked out on the piazza. She’d photograph the front of the building so that Mitchell’s editor would be able to see that his ace reporter was indeed in Italy with his nose to the grindstone. He could then edit the size of the picture any way he wanted to. Her guarantee was that Hadiyyah would look soulful in spades.

Corsico wasn’t thrilled to bits with this plan, but he handed over his digital camera. Barbara took it from him and told him what she wanted in exchange for the picture, which was a conversation with one of his new Italian journalist mates, one with access to the television news.

“Why?” Corsico asked her warily.

“Just do it, Mitchell.” She strode back across the piazza.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

When Salvatore took the phone call from DI Lynley, he saw at once that the connection suggested by the London man had more than one application. DARBA Italia, Lynley had told him, was the manufacturer of two of the incubators in the laboratory of Professor Taymullah Azhar, creating a heretofore unknown link between the microbiologist and Italy that needed exploration. Salvatore agreed with this, but the very idea of manufacturers of incubators prompted him to think in larger terms than a single company. At an international conference of microbiologists, surely manufacturers of the equipment they used showed up to demonstrate their wares in the hope of sales, no?

So he gave Ottavia Schwartz new direction under the topic of Investigating the Berlin Conference. She had two new assignments, he told her. Had manufacturers of laboratory equipment been present at the conference? If so, who were they and what individuals—by name—had represented them in Berlin?

“What are we looking for?” Ottavia asked, not unreasonably.

When Salvatore said that he wasn’t entirely sure, she sighed, muttered, but got on with it.

He went to Giorgio Simione next. “DARBA Italia,” he said to him. “I want to know everything about it.”

“What is it?” Giorgio asked.

“I have no idea. That’s why I want to know everything.”

Salvatore was heading back to his office, then, when he saw Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers just entering the lobby of the questura. She was not accompanied by translator Marcella Lapaglia on this day, however. She was alone.

Salvatore went to her. She was, he noted, garbed not dissimilarly from the previous day. The clothes themselves were different, but their dishevelled nature was unchanged. Her tank top was, at least, tucked in. But as this emphasised the wine-barrel shape of her body, she might have been better advised to wear it untucked.

When she saw him, she began speaking, at a volume and with exaggerated movements that attempted to clarify what she was trying to tell him. In spite of himself, he had to smile. She was as earnest as he’d ever seen anyone. It took some fortitude to attempt to make oneself understood in a country where one was a stranger and didn’t speak the language. In her place, he wondered if he’d be able to do the same.

She pointed to herself. “I,” she said, “want you”—pointing at him—“to watch”—pointing to her eyeballs —“this”—pointing to the screen of a laptop that she was holding.

“Ah. You want I must to watch something,” he said in his terrible English. Then, “Che cos’e? E perche? Mi dispiace, ma sono molto occupato stamattina.”

“Bloody goddamn,” the woman muttered to herself. “What’d he just say?”

She went through the pointing and speaking routine a second time. Salvatore realised it would be quicker to watch whatever she wanted him to watch than it would be to find someone who could translate what he already understood. So he gestured that she was to follow him to his office. On the way he asked Ottavia to find the usual translator on the chance that what the English detective wanted him to see was going to prompt him to ask her questions. Barring that individual’s availability, he told her, find someone else. But not Birgit. Chiaro?