Just One Evil Act

Khushi had given her a very bad night. Khushi had insisted that she ring Taymullah Azhar in Italy and demand a few answers. What stopped her from doing this was a basic tenet about police work: You don’t give away the game when you’re in the middle of it, and you sure as bloody hell do not clue in a suspect that he is a suspect when he doesn’t think he’s a suspect at all.

Yet the idea of Azhar as a suspect felt like a hot coal lodged in her throat even now, in the midst of the morning meeting. Azhar was, after all, her friend. Azhar was, after all, a man whom Barbara thought she knew well. The idea of Azhar being in reality someone who could orchestrate the kidnap of his own daughter was unthinkable. For no matter how she looked at the matter, the same facts that she’d delivered to Dwayne Doughty remained at the core of what the private detective was alleging about Azhar: His work and his life were in London, so even if he had somehow arranged the snatching of his daughter, how the hell was he supposed to have put his mitts on her passport, eh? And even if he’d somehow managed to produce another passport for her, he would have then returned with her to London and Angelina Upman would have done exactly what she did do in the company of Lorenzo Mura, which was to turn up on Azhar’s doorstep demanding the return of her child.

Yet . . . there was khushi. Barbara tried to come up with a reason why Doughty might have known this pet name that Azhar had for his daughter. She supposed Azhar might have told the man in passing, perhaps at some point referring to Hadiyyah that way. But in all the time Barbara had known him, she’d only heard him use the word when he was speaking to Hadiyyah. He never referred to her with the term. So why would he refer to her as khushi when speaking to Doughty? she wondered. The answer seemed to be that he wouldn’t. But that answer begged the question: What was she going to do next, post Doughty’s allegations?

Ringing someone seemed the only answer: ringing Lynley in order to lay before him the facts she had and to ask his advice or ringing Azhar and cleverly gleaning from him some indication that Doughty’s claims were either true or false. Barbara wanted to do the first. But she knew she had to do the second. Had Azhar been in London, she could have confronted him in order to watch his face when she spoke. But he wasn’t in London and Hadiyyah was still missing and she had no real choice in the matter of what to do next, did she?

She waited for an opportune moment long after the morning meeting when DI Stewart was otherwise engaged. She reached Azhar on his mobile, but the connection was bad. It turned out that he was in the Alps, he told her, and for a moment she thought he’d actually gone to Switzerland for some mad reason. When she yelped, “The Alps?” he clarified with, “These are the Apuan Alps. They are north of Lucca,” and the connection improved as he moved into what he said was a small piazza in one of the villages tucked into those mountains.

He was searching it, he told her. He intended to search every village he came upon as he travelled higher and higher on a road that twisted into the Alps. It was from this road that a red convertible had crashed down a cliff, the driver dying when thrown from it. And inside this convertible, Barbara—

At this, the poor man’s voice wavered. Barbara’s hands and her feet went completely dead. She said, “What? Azhar, what?”

“They think Hadiyyah was with this man,” he said. “They have gone to Angelina’s home for her fingerprints, for DNA samples, for . . . I do not know what else.”

Barbara could tell he was trying not to weep. She said, “Azhar.”

“I could not just remain in Lucca and wait for news. They will compare the car—what they find in it and on it—and they will then know, but I . . . To hear she might have been with him and then to know . . .” A silence, then a barely controlled gasp. Barbara knew how humiliating it would be for him to be heard weeping by anyone. He said at last, “Forgive me. This is unseemly.”

“Bloody hell,” she said in a fierce whisper. “Azhar, this is your daughter we’re talking about. There is no ‘I should not’ between you and me when it comes to Hadiyyah, okay?”

This appeared to make matters worse, for then he sobbed, managing only “Thank you” and nothing more.

She waited. She wished she were there, wherever he was in the Alps, because she would have taken him into her arms for what comfort she could offer in this situation. But it would have been a cold comfort indeed. When a child went missing, each day that passed was a day that lessened the possibility of that child’s ever being found alive.

Azhar finally managed to give her more details as well as a name: Roberto Squali. He was at the heart of what had happened to Hadiyyah. He was the driver of the crashed car, who was dead.

“A name is a starting place,” Barbara told him. “A name, Azhar, is a good starting place.”

Which brought her, of course, to the pet name khushi and the reason for her call. But she couldn’t find it in herself to mention this to Hadiyyah’s father just now. He was already upset enough with this turn of events. Asking him about khushi or making insinuations about his putative Berlin alibi or requiring of him definitive proof that he wasn’t the mastermind behind the disappearance of a most beloved child as claimed by the private investigator he’d hired . . . Barbara realised she couldn’t do this to him. For the very idea that he would set off to Berlin and establish an alibi while someone he’d hired in Italy was snatching his daughter from a public market . . . It didn’t make sense. Not when one put Angelina Upman into the picture. Unless, of course, the plan was to hold Hadiyyah somewhere until her mother came to believe she was dead. But what mother of a missing child ever gave up hope? And even if this was the plan and Azhar intended somehow to spirit his daughter back to England sans passport at some point six or eight or ten months from now, what was Hadiyyah supposed to do then? Never contact her mother again?

None of these conjectures made sense to Barbara. Azhar was innocent. He was in intolerable pain. And what she didn’t need to do at the moment was to make things worse with pointed questions about Dwayne Doughty’s claims and his declaration of khushi, as if a word in Urdu held the key to a life-and-death puzzle that seemed to enlarge with every day that passed.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

By late morning, Salvatore had the confirmation for his suspicions. The missing child’s fingerprints were, indeed, in the red convertible. Forensic officers in the company of DI Lynley had gone to Fattoria di Santa Zita to obtain samples from the little girl’s bedroom: fingerprints as well as DNA from her hairbrush and toothbrush. The DNA results would not come in for some time. But the fingerprints had been a matter of a few hours only, to collect them, to take them to the laboratory, and to compare them to what had been found in the car, on the sides of the leather passenger seat, on the seatbelt’s buckle, and on the fascia. DNA was hardly necessary after that, but since DNA results had long since become de rigueur during trials, appropriate tests would be made.

For his own work, however, Salvatore didn’t need those results. What he needed was an interview with anyone who knew Roberto Squali, and he began with the man’s home address. This was in Via del Fosso, a north-south lane through the walled city. This route was, most unusually, cut down its centre by a narrow canal from which fresh ferns sprang between crevices on its edges, and Squali’s residence was on the west side of this canal, through a heavy door that hid one of Lucca’s fine private gardens.

Most men of Squali’s age in Italy did not live alone. Rather, they lived at home with their parents, generally waited upon by their doting mammas until such a time as they married. But this did not prove true for Roberto Squali. As things turned out, Squali was from Rome and his parents still lived there. The young man himself had a residence at the home of his paternal aunt and her husband, and upon questioning them, Salvatore discovered that such had been the case since Roberto’s adolescence.

The aunt and uncle—surnamed Medici (alas, no relation)—met with Salvatore in the garden, where beneath the branches of a fig tree, they sat on the edges of their chairs as if to spring away from him at the least provocation. From an earlier visit made by the police, they’d learned of their nephew’s death via automobile accident; his parents in Rome had been informed; there the family were devastated; a funeral was even now being arranged.

No tears were shed in the garden for Roberto’s unexpected passing. Salvatore thought this strange. Considering the length of time that Squali had lived with his aunt and uncle, it seemed to him that they would have come to consider him something of a son. But they had not, and some careful probing on his part turned up the