Just One Evil Act

when this man showed up, all the children were gone.

VICTORIA

LONDON

The next time Mitchell Corsico got in touch, it was by phone. This was a case of thank-God-for-very-small- favours, though, because the tune he was singing when Barbara took the call was the same tune he’d been singing the last time she’d spoken to him. Things were ramped up at this point, though.The Sun, the Mirror, and the Daily Mail had begun investing some rather significant money in following the kidnapping tale by means of placing boots on the ground in Tuscany. There was competition to get new angles every day, and Mitchell Corsico wanted his own.

Tiresomely, though, he was back to Met Officer Involved with Love Rat Dad, Barbara discovered. He was also back to making threats. He wanted his bloody exclusive interviews with Azhar and Nafeeza, and Barbara was the means to get them for him. If she didn’t manage this feat, she could expect to see her mug on the front page of The Source, entangled with the son and the father of Azhar in a street imbroglio.

There was no point in telling him that the angle to pursue was Mother of Kidnapped Girl in Hospital. The Daily Mail was already onto that. For its part, the Mirror was having fun speculating on what had put Angelina Upman into a hospital bed in the first place. They appeared to like the idea of a suicide attempt—Distraught Mother Ends Up in Hospital—which they were able to hint at since no one in Italy was telling their reporter a single thing.

Barbara tried to reason with Corsico. “The story’s in Italy,” she told him. “What the bloody hell are you still doing in London trying to follow it, Mitchell?”

“You and I both know the value of an interview,” Corsico countered. “Don’t pretend you think prowling round some Italian hospital is going to produce shit because we both know that’s bollocks.”

“Fine. Then interview someone over there. But interviewing Nafeeza or talking to Sayyid again . . . Where the bloody hell is that going to take you?”

“Give me Lynley, then,” Corsico told her. “Give me his mobile’s number.”

“If you want to talk to the inspector, you can get your arse over there and talk to the inspector. Hang round the Lucca police station and you’ll see him soon enough. Call the hotels to find him. The town’s not big. How many could there be?”

“I’m not pursuing the same fucking angle every other paper’s going with. We broke the story and we’re planning to keep breaking it. Joining every Tom, Dick, and Giuseppe over in Tuscany gives me nothing but shit in a basket. Now, way I see it is you’ve got a decision to make. Three choices and I’m giving you thirty seconds to decide once I name them, okay? One: You give me the wife for an interview. Two: You give me Azhar for an interview. Three: I break the Met Officer and Love Rat Dad angle. Come to think, I’ll give you four: You give me Lynley’s mobile. Now. Do I start counting, or do you have a watch to look at to see the seconds flying by while you decide which it’s going to be?”

“Look, you bloody fool,” Barbara said, “I don’t know how many ways to tell you the story’s in Italy. Lynley’s in Italy, Azhar’s in Italy, Angelina is in hospital in Italy. Hadiyyah’s in Italy and so’s her bloody kidnapper and so’re the police. Now if you want to stay here and follow the Love Rat Dad and whatever the hell you think my involvement with him is supposed to be, more power to you. You can write chapter and verse and another chapter about whatever you imagine our hot love affair is like, and you’ve got your scoop or whatever the hell you want to call it. But another rag is going to pick up the story and want to interview me for my explanation, and what I’m going to tell them—I promise you—is how I’ve been trying to keep The Source from exploiting an anguished teenager’s understandable upset about his dad in order to milk a story out of him that’s sixty percent fury and forty percent fantasy and perhaps they ought to look at the source —pardon the pun—of the story in The Source since for some reason that reporter is fixated on something having nothing to do with a little girl’s disappearance in a foreign country and what does that tell you about the value of even buying a copy of the worthless rag, gentle readers?”

“Yeah. Right. Brilliant move, Barb. As if the unwashed public out there is the least bit interested in anything beyond gossip. You’re threatening me in the wrong direction. I make my living feeding garbage to the gulls, and they’re eating it up just like always.”

Barbara knew there was truth in this. Tabloids appealed to the worst inclinations in human nature. They made their money off people’s appetite for learning about others’ sins, corruption, and greed. Because of this fact, however, she had an ace and she knew there was nothing for it but to play the card now.

“That being the case,” she said to Corsico, “how about a new angle for you, then, one the other tabloids don’t have?”

“They don’t have Met Officer Involved—”

“Right. Let’s give that a rest for forty-five seconds. They also don’t have Love Rat Mum Who Took Off with Her Kid in the First Place Now Up the Spout with Yet Another Bloke’s Kid. Trust me on this. They don’t have that story.”

There was silence at the other end. In it, Barbara could almost hear the wheels of speculation turning in Corsico’s head. Because of those wheels and what they might come up with, she went on.

“You like that one, Mitchell? It’s gold and it’s true. Now, the bloody story’s in Italy where it’s been all along and I’ve given you something no one else has. You can use it, abuse it, or lose it, okay? As for me, I’ve got other things to do.”

Then she rang off. Doing this was a risk. Corsico could easily call the bluff of her bravado and run with his story, whose picture on the front page of the paper would call into question how she’d got herself over to Ilford in the first place in the middle of her workday. With John Stewart scrutinising her every move, this was something so far less than desirable that Barbara knew she was in no small part mad to risk alienating Corsico by cutting him off. But she had things to do and none of them were related to dancing to the journalist’s tune just now.

She’d talked to Lynley. She knew an arrest had been made, but she also knew from his description of things in Lucca that this arrest of one Carlo Casparia was based mostly on the fantasy of the public prosecutor. Lynley had explained to her how investigations proceeded in Italy—with the public prosecutor madly up to his eyeballs in the enquiry almost from the get-go—and he’d also told her that the chief inspector had ideas in conflict with the public prosecutor who headed the investigation, so “Chief Inspector Lo Bianco and I are walking rather carefully over here,” he said. This, she knew, was code for “We’re following our own leads in the matter.” These apparently had to do with Lorenzo Mura, a red convertible, a playing field in a park, and a set of photographs taken by a tourist in the mercato from which Hadiyyah had disappeared. Lynley didn’t say how these things related to each other, but the fact that he and the chief inspector in Italy were not satisfied with the arrest told her that there was still fertile ground to be explored both there and in London and she needed to see about exploring it.

In this, Isabelle Ardery inadvertently helped out. Since she’d instructed DI Stewart to give Barbara assignments that reflected her rank as a detective sergeant, he’d had no choice but to put her back out in the street with a suitable action assigned to her, one relating to either of the two investigations that he was supposed to be conducting. That the DI wasn’t happy with this turn of events was evident in his surly manner of making the day’s assignments. That he intended to dog Barbara, despite Ardery’s instructions, was evident when he continued watching her like a bird of prey in search of a meal.

She had phone calls to make before she set out on her given activities, and Stewart placed himself close enough to her to hear every word of them. It was only luck that Corsico had rung her while she was making a purchase at one of the vending machines in the stairwell, Barbara realised.

She made three phone calls to set up the three interviews she’d been directed by Stewart to conduct. She made a show of taking down times and addresses, and she made more of a show of using the Internet to plot a route from one interview to the next that used her time in an efficacious manner. Then she gathered her notebook and her bag, and she headed out. Luckily Winston Nkata was still at his desk, so she stopped there, flipped open her notebook ostentatiously, and made a show of noting Winston’s replies to her questions.

These were simple enough. She’d asked him to check on Azhar’s Berlin alibi because she knew she couldn’t