Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

“For the love of God, Barbara.”

“It has nothing to do with God. Or with love. It has to do with what’s right.”

She cut off the call. She found her eyes were stinging. She found her palms were wet. Christ, she thought, she had to get herself sorted . She went to the breakfast room, downed a glass of orange juice still on the sideboard, sardonically thought, Whoops! Must be careful. Someone could’ve put E. coli in there. And she wanted to weep. But she had to think and what she thought first was that she would ring Simon and Deborah St. James. She would ask them. Or p’rhaps Winston. He lived with his parents, right? They could mind Hadiyyah, couldn’t they? Or a girlfriend of his could do the minding. He had to have dozens. Or Mrs. Silver back in Chalk Farm who minded Hadiyyah during school holidays. Except of course Chalk Farm would be the first place anyone would look for her, inside one of the other flats in the converted Edwardian house.

Something, something, something, she thought. She herself could take the child back to London, but that left Azhar to his fate and she couldn’t have that. No matter what anyone said or anyone believed, she knew the truth of who the man was.

She went in search of Hadiyyah. For now she would keep the little girl with her. It was the best she could do. Come hell or whatever, she had no intention of allowing her to fall into the hands of the Upmans.

Hadiyyah was still in the family area. Signora Vallera had joined her to watch the DVD, which looked to Barbara as if it was on its third or fourth time through the interview.

She sat in a straight-backed chair to watch along with the others as Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar talked about their missing child. The camera showed Angelina’s exhausted face. The camera showed Azhar. The camera dollied back to show where they sat at the table beneath the arbour in the company of the man with the wart-infested face. He talked with such velocity and such passion that it was difficult to notice anything save him. The other two people, the table, the background . . . it all faded away as the man spat and roared.

Which, Barbara realised with a bolt of understanding, was why the film had played on television, had been given to Hadiyyah, had been watched and watched without a single person involved seeing what was in front of them the entire time.

“Oh my God,” she murmured.

She felt dazed and her mind began to spin as she tried to come up with a next step and then another and then a third, all of which could evolve into a plan. Lynley, she knew, would not help her now. That left only one possibility.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Thus, Mitchell Corsico was the proverbial port in the storm that was brewing. He’d been in Italy long enough to acquire the sort of sources Barbara needed now, but she knew he was going to want a deal. He wouldn’t hand anything over to her unless he had his picture of Hadiyyah. So she rang his mobile and she prepared herself for a round of bargaining with the bloke.

“Where are you?” she asked him. “We need to talk.”

“Your lucky day,” he told her. He was just outside in the piazza at that very moment, enjoying a caffè and a brioche as he waited for Barb to come to her senses in the matter of Hadiyyah Upman. He’d been working on the story, by the way. It was a real tearjerker. Rodney Aronson was going to love it. Page one guaranteed.

Barbara said sourly, “You’re the confident one, aren’t you?”

“In this business, you’d better be confident. ’Sides, one gets to know the scent of desperation.”

“Whose?”

“Oh, I wager you know.”

She told him to stay where he was as she was coming out to meet him. She found him as promised: beneath an umbrella at a café table across from the pensione . He’d finished his coffee and pastry, and he was busily tapping away at his laptop. His remark of “Christ, I’m brilliant” as she reached him told her he was working on his Hadiyyah story.

She took from her bag the school photo of Hadiyyah that she had showed Aldo Greco on the previous day. She laid it on the table, but she didn’t sit.

Mitch looked at the photo and then at her. “And this is . . . ?”

“What you want.”

“Uh . . . no.” He pushed it back to her and went on typing. “If I’m manufacturing horse dung here”—with a gesture at his laptop—“for the delectation of the great UK public, then something about the tale has to be genuine and what that something is going to be is a picture of the kid here in Italy.”

“Mitch, listen—”

“ You listen, Barb. F’r all Rod knows I’m here having the holiday of a lifetime although God knows why I’d choose Lucca to have it in since its after-dinner nightlife consists of hundreds of Italians on bikes, in trainers, or with pushchairs circling the town on that wall like crows contemplating fresh roadkill. But he doesn’t know that, does he? Far as he’s concerned, Lucca’s Italy’s answer to Miami Beach. I need something that shows him I’m hot on the trail of whatever. Now, from what I can tell, you need to be hot on the trail of whatever, so let’s cooperate with each other. We’ll start with a picture of the kid—showing she’s in goddamn Italy, by the way—and we’ll go from there.”

Barbara could see that further argument would get her nowhere. She took back the photo of Hadiyyah and struck the deal. She’d get him that picture herself as there was no way in hell she ever wanted it getting back to Azhar that she’d allowed a tabloid journalist to photograph his daughter. She’d pose Hadiyyah at the window of the breakfast room, which looked out on the piazza. She’d photograph the front of the building so that Mitchell’s editor would be able to see that his ace reporter was indeed in Italy with his nose to the grindstone. He could then edit the size of the picture any way he wanted to. Her guarantee was that Hadiyyah would look soulful in spades.

Corsico wasn’t thrilled to bits with this plan, but he handed over his digital camera. Barbara took it from him and told him what she wanted in exchange for the picture, which was a conversation with one of his new Italian journalist mates, one with access to the television news.

“Why?” Corsico asked her warily.

“Just do it, Mitchell.” She strode back across the piazza .

LUCCA

TUSCANY

When Salvatore took the phone call from DI Lynley, he saw at once that the connection suggested by the London man had more than one application. DARBA Italia, Lynley had told him, was the manufacturer of two of the incubators in the laboratory of Professor Taymullah Azhar, creating a heretofore unknown link between the microbiologist and Italy that needed exploration. Salvatore agreed with this, but the very idea of manufacturers of incubators prompted him to think in larger terms than a single company. At an international conference of microbiologists, surely manufacturers of the equipment they used showed up to demonstrate their wares in the hope of sales, no?

So he gave Ottavia Schwartz new direction under the topic of Investigating the Berlin Conference. She had two new assignments, he told her. Had manufacturers of laboratory equipment been present at the conference? If so, who were they and what individuals—by name—had represented them in Berlin?

“What are we looking for?” Ottavia asked, not unreasonably.

When Salvatore said that he wasn’t entirely sure, she sighed, muttered, but got on with it.

He went to Giorgio Simione next. “DARBA Italia,” he said to him. “I want to know everything about it.”

“What is it?” Giorgio asked.

“I have no idea. That’s why I want to know everything.”