Just One Evil Act

He pointed a warning finger at her. “That’s not how we’re going to play this.”

“Forget it, Mitchell. He’s agreed to wear a wire, and if I give you his name and you use it, the entire investigation goes straight to hell.”

“You can trust me,” he said.

“I trust you like I trust my hair to stop growing.”

“I won’t use the name till you say the word.”

“Not going to happen and that’s how it is. You write your story. You leave blanks or whatever else you want to leave where the names should go. Once we have what we need from the wire, I give you the names and then you hit send. That’s how it has to be because there’s too much on the line.”

He thought about this for a moment, slurping his coffee another time. Around them Mercato Centrale was starting to heat up with activity as more vendors arrived and organised themselves in something of a ring round the place. The coffee-selling business began to be brisk.

Corsico finally said, “Problem is . . . I don’t trust you not to go sour on me. I think some kind of guarantee . . .”

She nodded at his laptop and said, “You’ve got your guarantee right there. I don’t do what you want when you want it, you just hit send.”

“Send this, you mean?” He clicked and the story was on its way to his editor. “Whoops,” he said solemnly. “There it goes, Barb.”

“And there goes our deal,” she told him.

“I don’t think so.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because of this.” He did a bit more expert manoeuvring and revealed another story he’d been writing. This one’s proposed headline was Dad Was Behind It, and when Barbara read through it quickly, her teeth seemed to grind of their own volition.

He’d got to Doughty. Or Doughty had got to him. Or perhaps it was Emily Cass or Bryan Smythe, but she reckoned on Doughty. He’d given Mitch Corsico line and level, A to Z, the whole bleeding alpha to omega on Azhar, on Barbara, on Hadiyyah’s disappearance, and on her subsequent kidnapping in Italy. He’d given him names and dates and places. He had, in effect, pointed a loaded gun at Azhar. He’d also put an end to her career.

Barbara discovered that one couldn’t actually think when one’s heart was leaping about like a wounded kangaroo. She raised her eyes from the laptop’s screen and simply had nothing to say other than, “You can’t do this.”

Mitch said, “Alas and alack,” in a tone so speciously solemn that she wanted to punch him. Then this tone altered and the words were stone. He glanced at his watch. “Midday should do it, don’t you think?”

She said, “Noon? What’re you talking about?” although she had a fairly good idea.

“I’m talking about how much time you have before this baby rockets off into cyberspace, Barb.”

“I can’t guarantee—”

He waggled a finger at her. “But I can,” he said.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Barbara named it a miracle that she found her way back to Torre Lo Bianco, although she didn’t do it without several wrong turns. But as things developed, the tower was well known to the citizens of Lucca because of its rooftop garden, and it seemed that many of them used it as some sort of landmark. Everyone she asked knew where it was, although the directions to get there—always in Italian—seemed more complicated each time she enquired about them. It took her an hour to locate it. By the time she arrived, everyone in the tower was in the kitchen.

Salvatore was at his coffee, Hadiyyah was at a mug of hot chocolate, and Mamma was at a stack of what looked like demented tarot cards, which she was laying out in front of Hadiyyah. Barbara looked at these as a way of avoiding Salvatore’s speculative gaze. Mamma was presenting one that depicted a robe-clad woman holding a tray that contained a pair of eyeballs, presumably hers if the blood on her face was anything to go by. Above this, other cards had been arranged: a bloke being crucified upside down, another chained to a pillar and sprouting arrows, a youngish man in a vat with a fire lit beneath it.

Barbara said, “Bloody hell! What’s going on?”

Hadiyyah said happily, “Nonna is teaching me ’bout the saints.”

“Could she possibly choose less bloody ones?”

“I don’t think there are any,” Hadiyyah confided. “At least not so far. Nonna says that what’s brilliant is you c’n always tell who the saint is by what’s going on in the picture ’cause it shows what happened to them. See, this is St. Peter on the upside-down cross, and this is St. Sebastian with the arrows and this”—she tapped the young man in the vat—“is St. John the ’Vangelist ’cause nothing they did to him killed him and look how God up here is sending gold rain down to put out the fire.”

“Guarda, guarda,” Mamma said to Hadiyyah, tapping yet another card, on which a young woman tied to a stake was being consumed by eager flames.

“St. Joan of Arc,” Barbara said.

Mamma looked delighted. “Brava, Barbara!” she cried.

“How’d you know?” asked Hadiyyah, equally delighted.

“Because us Brits killed her,” Barbara said. And since there was no further way to avoid it, she smiled at Salvatore and said, “Morning.”

He said, “’Giorno, Barbara.” He’d already risen politely, and he indicated an Italian coffeemaker that sat on a burner of the old stove. On the worktop next to this, an array of breakfast foods was spread out. Barbara said, “Cake for breakfast?” to him. “I could start liking this place.”

Hadiyyah said, “It’s a breakfast torta, Barbara.”

Mamma said, “Una torta, si. Va bene, Hadiyyah,” and she smoothed her hand fondly on Hadiyyah’s hair. To her son she said, “Una bambina dolce” to which Salvatore said, “Si, si,” but he seemed preoccupied.

When he presented Barbara with her coffee, he said something which Hadiyyah translated as, “Salvatore wants to know where you were,” as she was presented with another saint’s card, which Mamma announced as a depiction of San Rocco.

Barbara made walking motions with her fingers against the tabletop. “Out for a morning walk,” she told him.

“Ho fatto una passeggiata,” Hadiyyah said. “That’s how you say it.”

“Right. Oh fat-o una passa—whatever.”

“Ah. E dov’e andata?”

“An’ where did you go?” Hadiyyah translated.

“I got bloody well lost. Tell him I’m lucky I didn’t end up in Pisa.”

When Hadiyyah passed this along to Salvatore, the inspector smiled. But Barbara could see it didn’t touch his eyes, and she steeled herself for whatever was coming next. This turned out to be Salvatore’s mobile, which chimed. He looked at it and said, “Ispettore Lynley.”

She pressed a finger to her lips, asking Salvatore in this way to keep mum on her whereabouts. He nodded cooperatively.

He said with a smile, “Pronto, Tommaso,” into the mobile. But after a moment, his face altered. He glanced at Barbara, and he left the room.

VICTORIA

LONDON

Not having heard from Barbara Havers felt to Lynley distinctly like a case of no news being good news, although he knew how unlikely this was. So he was unsurprised when the relative ease he was feeling ended shortly after his arrival at work. Winston Nkata related that there was no connection to Italy that he could find among Angelina Upman’s family and associates aside from the fact that her parents were evidently now in Lucca,