Just One Evil Act

little girl’s father. In these he promised to come to Italy. In these he broke those promises.

“Was she able to access his email account in some way?” Lynley asked.

“She created a new account for him, through a friend of hers at University College,” Angelina told him. “I told my sister what to say in the emails. She said it.” Angelina turned to Lo Bianco. “So Hadiyyah had no reason to dislike Lorenzo, to think that he was going to stand in place of her father and to realise from this that her life was permanently altered. I made sure of that.”

“Still, there could be . . . It could be the daughter and Signor Mura . . .” Lo Bianco seemed to search for the word.

“Friction?” Lynley said. “There might have been friction between them?”

“There was no friction,” Angelina said. “There is no friction.”

“And Signor Mura, he likes your Hadiyyah?”

Angelina’s jaw loosened. If she could have gone paler than she already was, she would have done so. Lynley could see her taking in Lo Bianco’s question and drawing a conclusion from it. She said, “Renzo loves Hadiyyah. He would do nothing to harm her, if that’s what you’re thinking. Everything he’s done, everything I’ve done, it’s all been because of Hadiyyah. I wanted her back, I was so unhappy, I’d left Hari to be with Renzo here but I couldn’t do it without Hadiyyah, so I returned to Hari for those few months and waited and waited and Lorenzo waited, and it was all for Hadiyyah, because of Hadiyyah, so you can’t say Lorenzo . . .”

Lo Bianco produced the Italian version of tsk, tsk, tsk. Lynley tried to follow Angelina’s story. She’d woven, it seemed, quite a web of deceit to engineer her new life in Italy. This brought up a point of interest for him, one that might have implications from the past that reached into the present.

“When did you meet Signor Mura?” he asked her. “How did you meet him?”

She’d met him in London, she said. She’d been without an umbrella on a day with sudden rain, so she’d ducked for protection into Starbucks.

Lo Bianco made a noise of moderate disgust at this, and Lynley glanced at him. It was Starbucks, however, that was apparently garnering the Italian man’s disapproval and not the fact of Angelina Upman’s meeting someone inside the place.

The coffee house was crowded with other people having the same idea. Angelina purchased a cappuccino for herself and was drinking it on her feet by the window when Lorenzo entered with the same idea in mind: to get out of the rain. They began to chat, as people sometimes do, she explained. He’d come to London for three days’ holiday and the weather was maddening to him. In Tuscany at this time of year, he said, the sun is out, the days are warm, the flowers are blooming . . . You should come to Tuscany and see for yourself, he told her.

She could see that he looked for a wedding ring on her in that casual way that unattached people sometimes do when they meet one another. She did the same to him. She didn’t tell him about Azhar, about Hadiyyah, or about . . . other things. At the end of their time in the Starbucks when the rain had ceased, he handed her his card and said that if she ever came to Tuscany, she was to ring him and he would show her its beauties. And so, eventually, that was what she did. After a row with Hari . . . another row with Hari . . . always the nighttime rows with Hari, spoken in fierce whispers so that Hadiyyah wouldn’t know there were difficulties between her mother and father . . .

“‘Other things’?” was Lynley’s question at the end of her story. In his peripheral vision, he saw Lo Bianco’s sharp nod of approval.

“What?” she asked.

“You said that at that first meeting you didn’t tell Signor Mura about Hadiyyah, Azhar, or other things. I’m wondering what those other things were?”

Clearly, she didn’t want to go further, as her gaze moved away from Lynley and dropped to the table and the computer printouts upon it. She made a poor show of inauthentic concentration upon Lynley’s question. He finally said to her, “Every detail is important, you know,” and waited in silence. Lo Bianco did likewise. Water dripped in the enormous kitchen sink, and a clock ticked loudly. And she finally spoke.

“At that time, I didn’t tell Lorenzo about my lover,” she said.

Lo Bianco released a nearly silent whistle of air. Lynley glanced at him. Le donne, le donne, his expression said. Le cose che fanno.

“D’you mean another man?” Lynley clarified. “Other than Azhar.”

Yes, she said. One of the teachers at the dancing school where she took classes. A choreographer and an instructor. At the time of her meeting Lorenzo Mura, this man had been her lover for some years. When she left Azhar to take up life with Lorenzo, she also left this man.

“His name?” Lynley asked.

“He’s in London, Inspector Lynley. He’s not Italian. He doesn’t know Italy. He doesn’t know where I am. I simply . . . I mean I should have told him something. I should have told him anything. But I simply . . . stopped seeing him.”

“That wouldn’t have prevented him from trying to find you,” Lynley pointed out. “After several years as your lover—”

“It wasn’t serious,” she said hastily. “It was fun, a release, excitement. Between us, there was never any plan to be together permanently.”

“In your head,” Lo Bianco pointed out. “Ma forse . . .” This was true. Perhaps in the head of her lover an entirely different idea existed. “He was married?”

“Yes. So he wouldn’t have expected me to hang about in his life and when I left him—”

“It works not in that way,” Lo Bianco told her. “There are men, for them marriage equals not a thing.”

“I do need his name, Angelina,” Lynley told her. “The chief inspector’s right. While your previous lover could be completely uninvolved with what’s happened here in Italy, the fact of him in your life means that he needs to be eliminated from the enquiry. If he’s still in London, Barbara can handle this. But it has to be done.”

“Esteban Castro,” she finally said.

“He’s from Spain?”

“Mexico City,” she said. “His wife is English. Another dancer.”

“You were also . . .” Lo Bianco searched for the word, but Lynley was fairly certain where he was heading, so he cut in, saying, “You were acquainted with her?”

Angelina dropped her gaze again. “She was a friend.”

Before either Lynley or Lo Bianco could comment on these facts or ask further questions, Lorenzo Mura arrived at Fattoria di Santa Zita and entered as the others had done: through the ground-floor door that brought him along the dark passage and into the kitchen. He dropped an athletic bag on the tiles and came to the table. He kissed Angelina and asked what was going on among them. Clearly, he was fully capable of reading the atmosphere in the room. “Che cos’e successo?” he demanded.

Neither of the detectives spoke. It was, Lynley felt, for Angelina to tell her current lover—or not to tell him —of the subject they’d been discussing. She said to them, “Lorenzo knows about Esteban Castro. We have no secrets from each other.”

Lynley doubted that. Everyone had secrets. He was beginning to conclude that Angelina’s had deposited her into the position she occupied at the moment: mother of a missing child. He said, “And Taymullah Azhar?”

“What about Hari?” she asked.

“Sometimes relationships are open,” Lynley said. “Did he know about your other lover?”

“Please don’t tell Hari,” she said quickly.

With a grunt, Lorenzo pulled a chair from the table. He sat, grabbed a glass, and poured himself some wine. He tossed it back—no thoughtful sipping and evaluating here—and cut a wedge of cheese and a hunk of bread. He said fiercely, “Why do you protect this man?”

“Because I’ve dropped an explosive into his life and that’s enough. I won’t have him hurt more.”

“Merda.” Lorenzo shook his head. “This makes no sense, this . . . this care you have for this man.”

“We have a child together,” Angelina said. “When you have a child with someone, it changes things between you. That’s how things are.”

“Cosi dici.” Mura’s voice was gentler when he said this, but still he didn’t appear to