Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

She said to him quietly, very nearly in a whisper, “And how could I not have come, Azhar, once I heard about this?” She gestured to the room, to the prison.

He matched the barely audible tone she employed. “You have done too much already to try to help me. There is no help for what has happened now.”

“Oh, really? Why’s that? Did you actually do what they think you’ve done? Did you manage to get Angelina to down a dose of E. coli ? What did you put it in, her morning oatmeal?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Then, believe me, there’s help. But it’s time for you to start being straight with me. From A to Z. A’s the kidnapping, so let’s start there. I need to know everything.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

She shook her head bleakly. “That’s where you go wrong every time. You went wrong in December and you’ve gone wrong ever since. Why can’t you see that if you’re still lying about the kidnapping—”

“What do you mean? There’s nothing that I—”

“You wrote her a card, Azhar. Something for her kidnapper to hand to her so she would know for certain you were behind the snatching. You had him call her khushi and then give her a card, and in that card you told her to go with the man because he would bring her to you. Does this sound familiar?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She hissed, “Now, when in hell’re you going to stop lying to me? And how in hell d’you expect me to help you if you won’t start telling me the truth? About everything . DI Lynley gave me a copy of that card, by the way. And you can wager everything you’ve ever owned that the Lucca coppers are having the handwriting verified by an expert even as we speak. What the bloody hell were you thinking? Why did you take that risk?”

His reply was nearly inaudible. “I had to make sure she went with him. I told him to call her khushi , but how could I know that would be enough? I was desperate, Barbara. Can you not understand that? I had not seen my child in five months. What if she hadn’t gone with someone who merely called her khushi ? What if instead she had told Angelina that a stranger had approached her in the market, trying to lure her beyond the walls? Angelina would have made it impossible for anyone to get near her after that. Hadiyyah would have been lost to me forever.”

“Well, that’s been taken care of, hasn’t it?”

He looked at her in horror. “I did not—”

“Do you see how it looks? How everything looks? You hire a detective to find her, then you kidnap her, then you come over here playing at Concerned Dad, and you’ve got tickets to Pakistan. Hadiyyah gets found, hugs and kisses all round, and in very short order Angelina dies. And what she dies of is a microorganism and you’re a bloody microbiologist. Are you following me? This is how a case is built, Azhar. And if you don’t start being straight with me about what you know and what you’ve done and how you’ve done it, then I can’t help you and, more important, I can’t help Hadiyyah. Full stop.”

“I did not,” he murmured brokenly.

“Yeah? Well, someone bloody did,” she whispered fiercely. “Lo Bianco’s onto a bloke passing you a petri dish of E. coli when you were in Berlin. Or posting it to you afterwards. Someone called von Lohmann, from Heidelberg. Meantime, The Source has dug up a woman from Glasgow who studies E. coli and who was also at this bloody conference. You were on a panel with the Heidelberg bloke, and for all I know you played hide-the-salami with the Glasgow woman when the sun went down, all the better to get her ready to hand over a vial of bacteria when you needed it.”

He flinched. He said nothing. His eyes were pained.

She sighed and said, “Sorry. Sorry . But you have to see how things look and how they’re going to look when all the pieces get put together. So if there’s anything—and I mean anything at all—that you haven’t told me, now’s the time.”

At least he didn’t respond at once. This, Barbara thought, was a good sign because it meant he was thinking instead of just reacting. She needed that from him. Thinking and remembering both. And , she knew, he would pass along the information she’d given him so that his solicitor might have the information as to how Lo Bianco was building his case. So all wasn’t lost, and she needed very much to keep things that way.

He said, “There is nothing more. You know it all now.”

“Have you any message for Hadiyyah, then? She’s where I intend to head next.”

He shook his head. He said, “She must not know,” and he lifted his fingers in a tired gesture that spoke of his whereabouts and his state of mind.

“Then I won’t tell her,” Barbara said. “Let’s hope Mura has the same intention.”

FATTORIA DI SANTA ZITA

TUSCANY

Mitchell Corsico had a map to assist with the location of Fattoria di Santa Zita. He even knew who Santa Zita was. During his downtime in Lucca—which, as he put it, there had been a hell of a lot of—he’d seen the highlights of the town, and Santa Zita’s corpse was one of them, encased in a glass coffin in the church of San Frediano, up on an altar, kitted out in her maid’s clothes, he reported. Just the stuff to enhance every kid’s nightmares. God only knew why Lorenzo Mura’s property was named after her.

Barbara had already decided that she couldn’t take Corsico with her to Lorenzo Mura’s home. She hadn’t the first clue what was going to happen when she showed her mug at his place, and she didn’t want a journalist there to exploit what went down. She thought at first that leaving Mitchell behind would be a problem, but this didn’t turn out to be the case. From their excursion to the prison, he had to devise a story to send to his editor and he had limited time in which to do it. He’d remain in Lucca while she went to the fattoria , he told her, but he would expect a report from her, and it had better be a full one.

Right, Barbara told him. Whatever you say, Mitch.

On their way back from the prison, she cooperatively fed the journalist what details she could from her visit with Azhar, going heavy on the atmosphere of the place, on Azhar’s physical and emotional condition, and on the jeopardy that he faced with regard to the investigation. She went light on everything else, and the kidnapping she didn’t bring up at all.

No fool, Corsico didn’t take to her limited facts like a baby swallowing a spoonful of honey with the medicine. He jotted down notes, he demanded to know what the circumstances of the circumstantial evidence were, he asked good questions that she did her best to dodge, and at the end he reminded her of their relative positions. If she double-crossed him, she would be sorry, he told her.

“Mitchell, we’re in this together,” she reminded him.

“Don’t forget that” was his parting shot.

Azhar had told Barbara where Fattoria di Santa Zita was, and once she and Mitchell located the place on his map, she set off in his hire car after leaving him on the pavement along Via Borgo Giannotti outside of the city wall. She watched him duck into a café. When he was out of sight, she proceeded up the street, heading for the River Serchio and out of the town.

Fattoria di Santa Zita, she found, was high in the hills and up an unnerving road of hairpin turns and precipitous drops. The countryside here combined forest with agricultural land, and the agricultural land was heavily given to vineyards and olive groves. The fattoria was marked with an easily noticeable sign. The reason for this sign she discovered once she made the left turn and headed into the place: She nearly hit a yellow convertible MG on her route, a classic vehicle swervingly operated by a young man whose passenger was intent upon nibbling his neck. Brakes were applied all round, and the driver of the MG yelled out, “Whoops! Sorry about that! Hey, have the oh-seven Sangiovese. We bought a case of it. You can’t go wrong. Jesus, Caroline, get your hand out of there!” And with bursts of laughter from him and his companion, he managed to manoeuvre the MG past Barbara’s car and hence to the road.