Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

“We’re not in the pensione , Mitchell.”

“ What? Barb, if you’ve scarpered, there’s going to be hell—”

“Untwist them. We’re still in Lucca. But really, you can’t think I’d still be at the pensione with Hadiyyah’s grandparents about to show their mugs in town.”

“Well, they’re here. Tucked up in the San Luca Palace Hotel, by the way.”

“How d’you know?”

“It’s my job to know. Fact is, it’s my job to know all sorts of things, which is one of the many reasons I suggest you trot over here to the piazza . . . No, better yet. I need a coffee. I’ll meet you in Piazza del Carmine in twenty minutes. That should give you enough time to perform your morning toilette.”

“Mitchell, I have no clue where Piazza whatever-you-called-it is.”

“Del Carmine, Barb. And isn’t that why you’re a cop? To suss things out? Well, do a little sussing.”

“And if I don’t wish to accommodate you?”

“Then I just hit send.”

Barbara felt the grip of pain in her stomach. She said, “All right.”

“Wise decision.” He ended the call.

She dressed in a hurry. She looked at the time. Not even six in the morning but there was mercy in that. No one in Torre Lo Bianco appeared to be stirring.

Shoes in hand, she began a slow descent of the stairs. She worried that there might be something complicated about getting out of the tower, but it turned out to be a straightforward affair. Major key in the lock, but it rotated without a sound. She was out in the narrow street soon enough, wondering what direction she should take to find Piazza del Carmine.

She set off arbitrarily, just seeking another human presence in the cool early morning. She found it in the persons of an unshaven father-and-son duo trundling two large wooden carts of vegetables along a narrow path between a church and a walled garden. She said to them, lifting her shoulders quizzically and looking hopeful, “Piazza del Carmine?”

They looked at each other. “ Mi segua ,” the older one of them said. He gave the jerk of the head that Barbara was beginning to recognise as the Italian nonverbal for come along with me . She followed them. She wished she’d thought of breadcrumbs to find her way back to the tower at the end of whatever happened with Mitch Corsico, but there was no help for that now.

It wasn’t long before she found herself in the assigned meeting place, a less-than-scenic piazza that accommodated a disreputable-looking restaurant, an unopened supermarket, and a large mildewed white building of indeterminate age with Mercato Centrale across the front of it. This was where Barbara’s companions were themselves heading and after tossing “Piazza del Carmine,” over his shoulder, the younger of the men trundled his cart of vegetable boxes inside the place, followed by his companion, followed by Barbara.

She found Mitch Corsico without any trouble. She just tracked the scent of coffee to the far side of the space and there he was, leaning on a narrow counter built into a wall, a few feet away from an enterprising African adolescent selling takeaway coffee from a shopping trolley.

Corsico saluted her with his cardboard cup, saying, “I knew you had the right stuff.”

She scowled and went for some coffee herself. It teetered just north of utterly undrinkable, but times were desperate. She took it to where Corsico was standing, after throwing a few coins into the African’s palm and hoping they would do.

“And . . . ?” she said to Corsico.

“And the question is why didn’t you phone?”

Barbara thought for a moment, wondering how far she could push this. She said, “Look, Mitchell. When there’s something to phone you about, I’ll phone you.”

He evaluated the expression on her face, but he didn’t go for it, fondly shaking his head at her. “Doesn’t work that way,” he said and slurped his coffee. He turned his laptop so that she could see the screen. Grieving Parents of Dead Mum Speak of Abandonment and Loss was his title of the piece. She didn’t need to read far into it to see that he’d scored an interview with the Upmans. They’d employed their hatchets on Azhar: as a father and as the man who’d “ruined” their daughter like a villain from a Thomas Hardy novel.

“How the hell did you get them to talk?” she asked him, the only thing she could think of as her mind raced with possible ways to appease him.

“Had a chinwag with Lorenzo at the fattoria yesterday. They showed up while I was there.”

“Lucky,” she said.

“It had nothing to do with luck. So where did Lo Bianco stow you?”

She narrowed her eyes in response but said nothing.

He took this on board. He gave a martyred sigh. He said, “You shouldn’t have let him settle your account with Signora Vallera. She gets up early, by the way. A knock on the door and there she was, and dove means where in their lingo. Ispettore was clear enough to me. And where you and I come from, one and one still make two. What I expect at this point is that the Upmans will be seriously chuffed to know the inspector pulled you and Hadiyyah out of the pensione . But I also expect you’d rather I didn’t trot over to the San Luca Palace Hotel and interrupt their brekkers to give them the word.” He fiddled with the keys on his laptop, and Barbara saw him access his email, although she didn’t have a clue how he’d done it from this location. A few manoeuvres and he’d attached the Grieving Parents story to a message to his editor and his finger was hovering one click away from send. “Now, do we still have a deal or do we not, mate? Because as I’ve tried to explain to you ad nauseam, I’ve got to keep the beast fed or it’s going to eat me.”

“All right, all right,” she told him. “Yes, it was E. coli . Yes, it was intended for murder or at least for a very serious illness. I c’n confirm it came from that place I told you about: DARBA Italia. They make and test medical equipment, including incubators of the sort that breed bacteria for laboratories to study. One of the bacteria they have on site is E. coli , and it was handed over to Mura. The bloke who did it—”

“Name, Barb.”

“Not yet, Mitch.”

He pointed a warning finger at her. “That’s not how we’re going to play this.”

“Forget it, Mitchell. He’s agreed to wear a wire, and if I give you his name and you use it, the entire investigation goes straight to hell.”

“You can trust me,” he said.

“I trust you like I trust my hair to stop growing.”

“I won’t use the name till you say the word.”

“Not going to happen and that’s how it is. You write your story. You leave blanks or whatever else you want to leave where the names should go. Once we have what we need from the wire, I give you the names and then you hit send. That’s how it has to be because there’s too much on the line.”

He thought about this for a moment, slurping his coffee another time. Around them Mercato Centrale was starting to heat up with activity as more vendors arrived and organised themselves in something of a ring round the place. The coffee-selling business began to be brisk.

Corsico finally said, “Problem is . . . I don’t trust you not to go sour on me. I think some kind of guarantee . . .”

She nodded at his laptop and said, “You’ve got your guarantee right there. I don’t do what you want when you want it, you just hit send.”

“Send this, you mean?” He clicked and the story was on its way to his editor. “Whoops,” he said solemnly. “There it goes, Barb.”

“And there goes our deal,” she told him.