Just One Evil Act

Four separate corridors led from the chapel, each of them at a corner of the room and one of which they’d just travelled. Salvatore was trying to decide which of the remaining three might lead them to a human presence, when he heard the sound of women’s voices, just a quiet murmur in what otherwise would have been a place of silence and contemplation. Footsteps accompanied these voices. Someone said, “Certo, certo. Non si preoccupi. Ha fatto bene.”

Two women emerged from behind a wooden lattice that served to cover the doorway of the corridor nearest the chapel’s altar. One of them wore the habit of a Dominican nun. The other wore the uniform of a carabinieri captain. The nun halted abruptly, the first of them to catch sight of the two men—both in the clothing of civilians—standing in the convent chapel. She looked behind her for a moment, as if to retreat to safety behind the lattice, and Captain Mirenda spoke sharply.

“Chi sono?” This was, she told them, a cloistered convent. How had they gained entrance?

Salvatore identified himself and explained who Lynley was. They were there, he said, on the matter of the English girl who had vanished from Lucca, and he felt confident that Captain Mirenda was aware of that case.

She was, of course. How could she be otherwise since, unlike the nun who’d stepped into the shadows, she did not live in a protected world. But it seemed that she had either been summoned to the convent on another matter entirely, or she had not connected the reason she’d been summoned to anything that had gone before this moment, especially in a mercato in Lucca.

The nun murmured something. In the shadows, her face was hidden.

Salvatore explained that he and his companion were going to have to speak to the Mother Superior. He went on to say that he knew it was irregular for any of the nuns to meet with an outsider—particularly if that outsider was male—but there was an urgent need since a direct relationship existed between a young woman of the name of Domenica Medici and a man who had taken the little girl from Lucca.

Captain Mirenda glanced at the other woman. She said, “Che cosa vorrebbe fare? ”

Salvatore wanted to tell her that it was not a matter of what the nun wished to do at this point. This was a police matter, and the traditions of the cloister were going to have to be set aside. Where, he enquired, was Domenica Medici? Her parents had indicated she lived in this place. Roberto Squali had died on his way here. Evidence in his car proved the child had been a passenger at some point.

Captain Mirenda told them to wait in the chapel. Salvatore didn’t like this, but he decided a compromise was in order. The carabinieri had sent a woman for obvious reasons, and if it was down to her to open doors in this place, he could live with that.

She took the arm of the nun, and together they disappeared behind the lattice from which they’d emerged. In a few minutes, though, the captain was back. With her was a different nun altogether, and she didn’t shrink from their presence as had the other. This was Mother Superior, Captain Mirenda told them. It was she who had summoned the carabinieri to Villa Rivelli.

“Your wish is to see Domenica Medici?” Mother Superior was tall and stately, appearing ageless in her black-and-white habit. She wore the rimless spectacles that Salvatore remembered on the nuns of his youth. Then those glasses had seemed quirky, an antique fashion long out of vogue. Now they seemed trendy, striking an odd note of modernity out of keeping with the rest of Mother Superior’s attire. Behind the glasses, she fixed upon him a gaze that he remembered only too well from the classroom. It demanded truth, and it suggested that anything less would be quickly uncovered.

He recounted what he’d learned from the parents of Domenica Medici: that she lived on the grounds of Villa Rivelli and that she served as a caretaker. He added to this what he’d already told Captain Mirenda. This was a matter of some importance, he concluded. A child’s disappearance was involved.

It was Captain Mirenda who spoke. “Domenica Medici is here on the grounds,” she said. “And there is no child within the convent walls.”

“You have made a search?” Salvatore said.

“I have not needed to,” Captain Mirenda said.

For a moment, Salvatore thought she meant that the word of Mother Superior was good enough, and he could tell that Lynley thought the same, for the other man stirred next to him and said quietly, “Strano,” in a low voice.

Strange indeed, Salvatore thought. But Mother Superior clarified. There was a child, she said. From within the convent, she herself had both seen and heard her. She had assumed the girl was a relative come to stay for a time with Domenica. The reason for this was that she’d been delivered to the place by Domenica’s cousin. She played on the grounds of the villa and helped Domenica with her work. That she might not have been a member of Domenica’s family had not occurred to anyone in the convent.

“They have no contact here with the outside world,” Captain Mirenda said. “They did not know that a child has gone missing from Lucca.”

Salvatore very nearly didn’t want to ask why the carabinieri had been sent for, then. This was of no import, however, since DI Lynley did the asking himself.

Because of the screaming, Mother Superior told them quietly. And because of the tale Domenica had told when she’d been sent for by the nun and questioned about it.

“Lei crede che la bambina sia sua,” Captain Mirenda interjected abruptly.

Her own child? Salvatore thought. “Perche?” he asked.

“E pazza” was the captain’s answer.

Salvatore knew from speaking to Domenica’s parents that the girl was, perhaps, not right in the head. But for her to believe that the child brought here by her cousin was her own daughter took things in a direction so strange that it suggested the girl was, indeed, more mad than she was slow.

Mother Superior’s quiet voice filled in the rest of the details and comprised the information she’d gathered preceding her phone call. This man who had brought the child to the villa had once made Domenica pregnant. She’d been seventeen at the time. She was now twenty-six. To the poor girl, the age of the child seemed right. But it was, of course, no child of hers.

“Perche?” Salvatore asked the nun.

Again, the captain answered for her. “She prayed for God to take that child from her body so that her parents would never know she was pregnant.”

“E successo cosi?” Lynley asked.

“Si,” Captain Mirenda confirmed. That was indeed what had occurred. Or at least that was the tale Domenica had told Mother Superior when she’d been summoned into the convent upon the terrible screaming of the little girl. Captain Mirenda herself was on her way to question Domenica Medici about this. She would have no objection to the other policemen attending her.

Mother Superior spoke one last time before they left her. She murmured, “I did not know. She said it was her duty to prepare the little girl for God.”

VILLA RIVELLI

TUSCANY

Lynley had followed the conversation perfectly well, but he very nearly wished he hadn’t been able to do so. To have managed to track Hadiyyah to this place—for who else could it be but Hadiyyah brought into the Alps?— and to find themselves just hours too late . . . He couldn’t imagine how he was going to tell the girl’s parents. He also couldn’t imagine how he was going to relay the information to Barbara Havers.

He walked slowly in the wake of the carabinieri officer and Lo Bianco. Captain Mirenda had been told where Domenica Medici was to be found. A short distance from the villa and sheltered from it by a hedge of camellias in bloom, a stone barn stood. Within this barn a woman dressed in garb similar to the Mother Superior’s sat on a low stool milking a goat, her cheek resting on the animal’s flank and her eyes closed.

Lynley would have thought she was a nun herself, save for the subtle differences in her clothing from the habit worn by the Mother Superior. The essentials of it were the same: a white robe, a simple black veil. Most people, seeing her, would assume she was a member of the cloistered community.