Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

Lynley didn’t point out that the double negative resulted in Daniele Bruno being guilty of something , if only of being part of a fantasy from the fractured mind of a drug addict. For they had only the word of Carlo Casparia that Bruno had met Lorenzo Mura alone at the football practice field in the first place. And this word had come after being held without a solicitor’s involvement, after days of interrupted sleep and very little food. Daniele Bruno was a nonstarter, he reckoned, just like his wife.

But there had to be someone, somewhere, with access to something . . .

They both knew who that someone probably was.

St. James’s arrival at New Scotland Yard added little to the mix they had. Lynley met his friend in Reception, and they spoke to each other over morning coffee on the fourth floor.

It had been easy enough for St. James to visit Azhar’s lab. By virtue of his university background and his reputation as a forensic scientist and expert witness, he had colleagues everywhere. A few phone calls had made a walkthrough of the lab a simple thing to arrange. The excuse was meeting the distinguished professor of microbiology Taymullah Azhar. Since he wasn’t there, the offer made by one of Azhar’s two research technicians to show St. James round the lab was accepted with gratitude. They were fellow scientists after all, were they not?

The lab was extensive and impressive, St. James told Lynley, but for all intents and purposes the subject of study was indeed various strains of Streptococcus . The focus had to do with mutations of these strains, and the equipment in the lab supported this work.

“From what I could see, it appears to be a fairly straightforward operation,” St. James said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what’s there is what one would expect in a lab of its type: fume cupboards, centrifuge, autoclave, refrigerators for storing DNA, sequencers for the DNA data, freezers for bacterial isolates, incubators for bacterial cultures, computers . . . There appear to be two main areas of study going on: the Streptococcus that causes necrotising fasciitis—”

“Which is?”

St. James added a packet of sugar to his coffee and stirred it. “Flesh-eating bacteria syndrome,” he said.

“Good God.”

“The other is the S treptococcus that causes pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis. They’re both serious strains, obviously, but the second one—it’s called Streptococcus agalactiae —crosses the blood-brain barrier and can be deadly.”

Lynley thought about this. He said, “Is there a chance someone in the lab could be studying E. coli on the sly?”

“I suppose anything’s possible, Tommy, but to know for certain you’d need a mole inside the place. Some of the equipment could be used for E. coli cultures, obviously. But the broths for growing each of them would be different, as would the incubators. Strep requires a carbon dioxide incubator. E. coli doesn’t.”

“Could there be more than one kind in the lab?”

“More than one kind of incubator? Certainly. At least a dozen people work in the place. One of them may have something brewing that deals with E. coli. ”

“Without Azhar’s knowledge?”

“I doubt it would be without his knowledge unless someone has a nefarious reason for studying it.”

They exchanged a long look. St. James finally said, “Ah. It’s a tricky thing, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed.”

“He’s a friend of Barbara’s, isn’t he? Certainly, she could have some insight here, Tommy. Perhaps if she were to go to the lab herself and do a bit of delving on a pretext having to do with Azhar . . . ?”

“That’s not on, I’m afraid.”

“Can you get a search warrant, then?”

“If it comes to it, yes.”

St. James examined Lynley’s expression for a moment before he said, “But you hope it doesn’t come to that, I take it?”

“I’m not at all sure what I hope any longer” was Lynley’s reply.

VICTORIA

LONDON

He would have liked to talk to Barbara about what he’d learned from St. James. She’d been for years his go-to person when he wanted to toss round ideas in the course of an investigation. But it was unlikely that she would say anything, do anything, or admit to anything that might endanger Taymullah Azhar. So he was left to do his thinking alone.

It had been an excellent means of eliminating Angelina Upman. Once the small matter of no one else’s having been affected by the bacteria had been dealt with in one way or another, the road was clear to declaring her death an unfortunate result of food contamination by a virulent strain of bacteria that generally—if detected soon enough—killed no one. Complications from her pregnancy had prevented the doctors from realising what they were dealing with. As did Angelina’s own reluctance to stay in hospital once she finally took herself there. As did the fact that no one else who shared meals with her and no one else in Tuscany, for that matter, turned up in hospital with the same symptoms.

Someone must have seen how everything was going to play out, Lynley thought. That suggested Lorenzo Mura, but as to why he would wish to harm the woman who was carrying his child, the woman he loved and fully intended to marry . . . Unless, of course, all of his devotion was a front for something else.

He thought back over every encounter he’d had with the man. He could see the many ways in which Lorenzo had had the opportunity to mix the bacteria into Angelina’s food—the man was, after all, solicitous of her condition because of the pregnancy—but he couldn’t come up with how he’d got the stuff in the first place . . . until he remembered the man he’d seen at the fattoria when he’d first called there.

What had Lynley seen? A thick envelope handed from this unnamed man to Lorenzo Mura. What had Lorenzo declared? It was payment for one of the donkey foals he raised on the premises.

But what if that man had brought something other than money? Any possibility was one worth pursuing. Lynley picked up the phone and rang Salvatore Lo Bianco.

He had much to tell him anyway: He began with St. James’s visit to Taymullah Azhar’s lab, and he ended with the mystery man handing over an envelope to Lorenzo Mura at Fattoria di Santa Zita .

“Mura claimed it was cash for one of his foals. I thought nothing of it at the time, but if there’s actually no E. coli in Taymullah Azhar’s laboratory in London—”

“There is no E. coli now,” Salvatore replied. “But he would, of course, have no need of it now, would he, Ispettore ?”

“I see that. He’d have had to be rid of whatever was left—if indeed there was any left—when he returned to London, having already managed to get Angelina to ingest whatever he’d taken to Italy. But here’s something else to consider, Salvatore. What if Angelina was not the intended victim?”

“Who, then?” Salvatore asked.

“Perhaps Azhar?”

“How was he to ingest this E. coli ?”

“If Mura gave him something . . . ?”

“That he gave no one else? How would that have looked, my friend? ‘Eat this panino , signore, because you look hungry’? Or ‘Try this especial salsa di pomodoro on your pasta’? And how did he put his hands on E. coli ? And if he put his hands on it, how would he poison the professor but have no one else affected?”

“I think we must find the man with the donkeys,” Lynley said.

“Who does what? Brew E. coli in his bathtub? Notice it crawling round the droppings of a cow or two? My friend, you try to bend what you’ve seen to fit what you hope. You forget Berlin.”