Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

He was silent. Barbara glanced at Salvatore, who was speaking into his mobile, still a respectful distance from them. She knew how little time they had. Their conversation had already gone on too long for a woman who was only supposed to be passing along information about the state of her friend’s beloved child.

She said, “You can’t go back to London. And you can’t stay here. You’re cooked either way.”

His lips barely moved as he said, “What then do I do?”

“Again, Azhar, I think you know. You’ve not got a choice.” She waited for him to take this in, and she saw on his face that he had done so, for he blinked hard and she thought she saw on his lashes the brilliance of unshed tears. She said, although she felt as if the pain of doing so might actually drive a sword through her heart, “You still have family there, Azhar. They’ll welcome her. They’ll welcome you. She speaks the language. Or at least she’s been learning it. You’ve seen to that.”

“She won’t understand,” he said in an agonised voice. “How can I do this to her after what she has been through?”

“You don’t have a choice. And you’ll be there for her. You’ll ease her way. You’ll see to it her life there is an extraordinary one. And she’ll adjust, Azhar. She’ll have aunts and uncles. She’ll have cousins. It will be okay.”

“How can I—”

Barbara cut in, choosing to interpret the rest of his question in the only way possible now. She said, “Salvatore has your passports, probably locked away in the questura . He’ll hand them over, and you and Hadiyyah and I will head to the airport. Fond farewells to him and all the rest. He may take us there, but he won’t stay to see where we go or even if we depart. I’ll go to London. You’ll go . . . wherever you can go to get a flight to Lahore. Just out of Italy. Paris? Frankfurt? Stockholm? It doesn’t matter as long as it’s not London. You’ll do what you have to do at this point because it’s the only thing left. And you know it, Azhar. You bloody know it.”

He looked at her. She saw his dark eyes fill with tears. He said, “And you, Barbara? What about you?”

“Me?” She tried to sound lighthearted. “I’ll face the music back in London. I’ve done it before, and I’ll survive. Facing the music is what I do best.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

First was Torre Lo Bianco, where Hadiyyah leapt into her father’s arms and buried her face in his neck. He held her close. She said, “Barbara told me you were helping Salvatore. Did you help him a lot? What did you do ?”

Azhar cleared his throat roughly. He smoothed back wisps of her hair and said with a smile, “Many, many things did I do. But it is time for us to go now, khushi . Can you thank the signora and Inspector Lo Bianco for taking such good care of you while I was away?”

She did so. She hugged Salvatore’s mamma, who kissed her, got teary, and called her bella bambina , and she hugged Salvatore who said “ Niente, niente ” as she thanked him. She asked them both to tell Bianca and Marco arrivederci , and she said to Barbara, “D’you get to come home as well?”

Barbara told her that indeed she did, and in very short order, they’d taken their bags to where Salvatore had left his car and they were on their way to the questura . At every moment, Barbara looked for some sign that Mitch Corsico’s page-one story had somehow broken in Italy. She also looked for the Upmans on every street corner and behind every bush as they coursed the route along the viale outside the town wall.

At the questura , things moved rapidly and Barbara was immensely grateful for this. Passports were returned to Azhar, Hadiyyah was left in the company of Ottavia Schwartz, and the buxom translator was called in so that Azhar might hear Salvatore’s explanation of how Angelina Upman had come to die of ingesting a devastating strain of E. coli . He covered his mouth with his hand as he listened, and the pain in his eyes was evident. He pointed out that, had he been the one to drink the affected wine, it was likely he would have survived the subsequent illness. But because it had been Angelina who’d drunk it, Angelina who was already unwell with her pregnancy, things had been misinterpreted by her doctors until it was far too late. “I wished her no ill,” he concluded. “I would have you know that, Inspector.”

“Plenty of ill was wished towards you, Azhar,” Barbara put in. “And I wager you wouldn’t have gone to hospital had you got ill. You would’ve thought you’d picked up a bug: on the flight, in the water, whatever, eh? You’d’ve got over the first bout with this stuff, but then the next step would’ve been a worse bout and losing your kidneys and probably dying as well. Lorenzo might not have known all that, but it wasn’t important to him. Making you suffer was what he had in mind, with the hope that making you suffer would lead to making you gone from Angelina’s life.”

Salvatore listened to the translation of all this. Barbara cast a look in his direction, saw once again the solemnity of his expression, but also read the great kindness in his eyes. She knew that there was one more thing that had to be said in advance of Corsico’s damning kidnapping story breaking in the Italian papers.

She said to Azhar, “C’n you give me a moment with . . .” And she nodded in Salvatore’s direction.

He said of course, that he would go to Hadiyyah, that they would be waiting, and he left her alone with Salvatore and the translator to whom Barbara said, “Please tell him I’m sorry. Tell him, please, it was nothing personal, anything I did. It wasn’t meant as a betrayal or as using him or anything like that, although I bloody well know it looked that way. Tell him . . . See, I have this London journalist on my back—he’s the cowboy bloke Salvatore saw?—and he was here to help me help Azhar. See, Azhar’s my neighbour back in London and when Angelina took Hadiyyah from him, he was . . . Salvatore, he was so broken. And I couldn’t leave him like that, broken. Hadiyyah’s really all he has left in England in the way of family so I had to help him. And all of this . . . everything that’s gone on? Can you tell him it was all part of helping Azhar? That’s all, really. Because, see, this journalist has another story that he’s running and . . . that’s all that I can say, really. That’s all. That and I hope he understands.”

Salvatore listened to the translation, which came nearly as rapidly as Barbara herself was speaking. He didn’t look at the translator, though. He remained as he had been before, with his gaze on Barbara’s face.

At the end, there was silence. Barbara found that she couldn’t blame him for not replying and, indeed, that she didn’t actually want him to reply. For he was going to want to hunt her down and strangle her when he finally discovered what her next move had been, so to have his forgiveness in advance of betraying him another time . . . ? She didn’t know how she could contend with that anyway.

She said, “So I’ll say thanks and good-bye. We c’n take a taxi to the airport or—”

Salvatore interrupted. He spoke quietly and with what sounded like either kindness or resignation. She waited until he had finished and then said to the translator, “What?”

“The ispettore says that it has been a pleasure to know you,” the translator replied.

“He said more than that. He went on a bit. What else did he say?”

“He said that he will arrange your transport to the airport.”

She nodded. But then she felt compelled to add, “That’s it, then?”

The translator looked at Salvatore and then back at Barbara. A soft smile curved her lips. “No. Ispettore Lo Bianco has said that any man on earth would find himself lucky to have had in his life such a friend as you.”