Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

“His fatherhood is something unproven,” Salvatore pointed out. He was glad to see that his comment made her bristle once she heard Marcella’s translation of it.

“Right. Yes. Well. Whatever. You score a point on that one, don’t you. But a blood test will sort everything out soon enough. Look, for his part, he’s going to want to know where she is and what’s happening to her, and I want to be able to tell him that. Now you and I know that you c’n arrange it. I’d like you to do so.” She waited while Marcella translated. He was about to reply when she added, “You c’n think of it all as a merciful concession. Because . . . well, let me be frank. You do look like a merciful sort of bloke.” Before he could reply to this astonishing remark, she looked round and said, “D’you smoke, by the way, Inspector? Because I could do with a fag but I don’t want to offend.”

Salvatore emptied the ashtray he kept on his desk and handed it to her. She said, “Ta,” and began to dig round in a massive shoulder bag she’d set on the floor. She muttered and damned this and bloody helled that—these words he knew—and finally he reached in his jacket for his own cigarettes and handed them to her. “ Ecco ,” he said. To which she replied, “See? I said you looked like a merciful bloke.” And then she smiled. He was taken aback. She was, as an object of femininity, quite appalling, but she had an extraordinarily lovely smile and, unlike what he’d come to think of as the English predilection for doing nothing to improve the state of their dentition, she also seemed to care about her teeth, which were very straight, very white, and very nice. Before he knew what he was doing, he smiled back. She handed the cigarettes back to him, he took one, offered one to Marcella, and they all lit up.

She said, “C’n I be honest with you, Chief Inspector Lo Bianco?”

“Salvatore,” he said. And when she looked surprised, he said in English, “Not so long,” and he smiled.

“Barbara, then,” she replied. “It’s shorter as well.” She inhaled in a masculine fashion and seemed to let the smoke settle into her blood before she said, “So c’n I be honest, Salvatore?” And when he nodded at Marcella’s translation, “From what I c’n tell, you’re building a case against Taymullah Azhar. But c’n you put E. coli into his hands?”

“The conference in Berlin—”

“I know about Berlin. So he was at a conference? What difference does it make?”

“None at all till you look into the conference and discover that he was on a panel along with a scientist from Heidelberg. Friedrich von Lohmann, he’s called, this man. There, at the university in Heidelberg, he studies E. coli in a laboratory.”

Barbara Havers nodded, her eyes narrowing behind the smoke from her cigarette. “All right,” she said. “The panel bit? I didn’t know that. But ’f you ask me, it’s just coincidence. You lot can’t go into court with that, can you?”

“Someone has gone to Germany to interview this man,” Salvatore told her. “And you and I know that it would not be impossible at a conference of this kind for one scientist to ask another for a strain of bacteria to look at for some reason.”

“Like asking to see his vacation snaps?” she asked with a laugh.

“No,” he said. “But it would not be difficult for him to create a reason that he needed this bacteria, would it: the project of a graduate student whose work he is supervising, his own shift in interest perhaps. These are merely two examples he could have used with the Heidelberg man.”

“But bloody hell, Inspector . . . I mean, Salvatore, you can’t think these blokes carry samples round with them! What d’you have? Azhar giving Mr. Heidelberg—What was his name again?”

“Von Lohmann.”

“Right. Okay. So d’you see Azhar giving von Lohmann the word in Berlin and von Lohmann fishing the E. coli out of his suitcase?”

Salvatore felt himself growing hot. She was either deliberately misunderstanding his words, or Marcella was not translating them correctly. He said, “Of course I do not mean Professor von Lohmann had the E. coli with him. But the seed of Professor Azhar’s interest was planted at that conference and once Hadiyyah was kidnapped by means of the London detective, then further plans were laid.”

Marcella’s translation arrested the sergeant’s cigarette on its way to her mouth. She said, “What’re you saying, exactly?”

He said, “I’m saying that what I have in my possession is proof from London that the kidnapping of Hadiyyah Upman was engineered there, not here. This detective in London who sends me the information? He would like me to think that a man called Michelangelo Di Massimo developed the scheme in Pisa, with the solitary assistance of Taymullah Azhar.”

“Hang on right there. There’s no bloody way—”

“But I have documents here that prove otherwise. Many records that—compared to the earlier records which I also have—have been altered. My point is this. Things are not simple and I am not stupid. Professor Azhar has been charged with murder. But I suspect this is not all he will be charged with.”

The sergeant twirled her cigarette, using her thumb and her index and middle fingers in a way that suggested she’d smoked for decades. She held her cigarette like a man, as well. Salvatore wondered vaguely if she was a lesbian. Then he wondered if he was stereotyping lesbians. Then he wondered why he was wondering anything at all about the curious detective.

She said, “Want to share what’s taking your head in that direction? It’s a bloody strange one, you ask me.”

Salvatore was careful with what he told her. He had banking information that contradicted earlier banking information, he explained. This information made things look as if someone somewhere was fixing evidence.

She said, “Sounds like nothing’s traceable to Professor Azhar, far as I can tell.”

“It’s true that a forensic computer specialist will have to sort through it all to follow the trails. But this can be done, and it will be, eventually.”

“‘Eventually’?” She thought about this, drawing her heavy eyebrows together. “Ah. You’re not on that case any longer, are you? Someone gave me that info.”

He waited while Marcella struggled with info . When she had it straightened out in her mind and the translation came, he said, “Murder is, I think you will agree, a more pressing issue to be dealt with now that the child is safe and several arrests have been made for her kidnapping. Everything will happen in due time. It is how we do things in Italy.”

She crushed out her cigarette. She did this vigorously, however, and some of the ashes spilled onto her trousers. She tried to rub them off, which made things worse. She said, “Bloody hell” and “Oh well,” which she followed with, “As to seeing Azhar. I’d like a few words with him. You c’n arrange that, right?”

He nodded. He would do that for her, he decided, as it was only right that the professor see the police liaison from his own country. But he had a feeling that this Sergeant Havers knew more about Taymullah Azhar than she was telling him. He reckoned Lynley would be able to help him out with the questions he had about this strange woman.

VICTORIA

LONDON

The truth of the matter was that Lynley not only didn’t know if anything could save Barbara Havers, but he also didn’t know if he wanted to go to the effort even to forestall what was looking more and more like the inevitable conclusion to this business.

He told himself initially that the maddening woman didn’t really belong in police work anyway. She couldn’t cope with authority. She had a chip on her shoulder the size of a military tank. She had appalling personal habits. She was often dazzlingly unprofessional and not only in her manner of dress. She had a good mind, but half the time she didn’t use it. And half of the half when she did use her mind, it led her completely astray. As it had done now.