Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

If the mamma wept, that would be useful, Fanucci told him. Television cameras liked weeping women in situations when children went missing, no?

And when would this television filming occur? Salvatore enquired.

Two days hence, Fanucci told him. He himself and not Salvatore would do the speaking for the Italian police.

“ Certo, certo ,” Salvatore murmured with a sly smile at Fanucci’s eternal self-importance. The presence on television screens throughout Italy of Piero Fanucci would, of course, strike fear into the hearts of all malefactors.

CHALK FARM

LONDON

Mitchell Corsico had wasted no time. He had a reputation as a reporter who didn’t let grass grow, and this alacrity, combined with a nose for scandal, did not desert him just because Barbara had thwarted him at the secondary comprehensive that Taymullah Azhar’s son Sayyid attended. When Barbara caught sight of the front page of The Source the next day, she saw that out of what Corsico had witnessed in front of Sayyid’s school he had managed to create a stop-the-presses moment. Missing Girl Has Love Rat Dad was the headline that announced the sordid tale. Beneath this, several pictures of the deserted family offered evidence to accompany the story.

Barbara didn’t see red when her gaze fell upon this latest edition of The Source . She saw black: in the form of her vision going absolutely dark for a moment so that, in front of her local newsagent, she had a terrible instant of thinking she might well faint directly onto the chewing gum–studded pavement of Chalk Farm Road. How Corsico had managed to get his hands on the material displayed on the front page of the tabloid hovered between mystery and miracle to her. What she reckoned, though, was that the reporter had followed Azhar’s family directly to their home and employed one of several strong-arm techniques to get someone to talk.

These were easy enough for Barbara to envision: Corsico having a few words with neighbours and gathering information that way; Corsico shoving his card through the post slot in the door of Nafeeza’s home, telling her through this slender opening that it was a case of talk-to-me-or-let-your-neighbours-do-the-talking-for-you. He could even have found a friend of Sayyid and in this way got a message to the boy: Meet me at the pub the park the local cinema the corner grocery the railway station the bus stop. We can talk there. Here’s your chance to tell the full story. At the end of the day, what did it matter how he had put his sticky hands on the information? For the nasty tale was in the tabloid now, and the nasty tale named names.

Barbara rang Corsico. “What the bloody hell are you up to?” she demanded without preamble.

He didn’t enquire who was ringing his mobile. Obviously, he knew because his reply was “I thought this is what you wanted, Sergeant.”

“Do not use my rank on the phone,” she hissed. “Where the hell are you?”

“In bed, actually. Having a lie-in. And what’s the problem? Don’t want anyone to know that you and I are each other’s new best friend?”

Barbara let that one go. “The story isn’t about Azhar. The story is about the Italian police and how they’re handling—or not handling or refusing to handle or whatever —Hadiyyah’s disappearance. It was about the Met not sending an officer to assist. Then it was supposed to be about the Met sending a certain, particular, you-want-a-story-on-him officer over to assist. And then it was about you getting your fat arse over to Italy to keep the pressure on. I gave you all the details you needed and all the bloody hell you had to do was to use them in a story and to follow them—and not something else, mind you—to the next story. You knew this, Mitchell.”

He yawned loudly. Barbara wanted to dive into her mobile and beam herself into the louse’s bedroom, all the better to smack him silly. He said, “What I knew , as you put, is that you wanted a story. What I know is that you’ve got your story. Several, in fact, with more on the way. I’ve got some interesting pictures of yesterday’s scuffle with . . . I take it that was Granddad?”

“You need to back off,” she told him, although the idea of pictures made her momentarily dizzy. “You need to sodding back off, Mitchell. These people in Ilford are not the story. A missing English girl in Italy is. There’s plenty of information on that and I’ll get it to you as it comes in and in the bloody meantime—”

“Uh, Sergeant . . . ?” Corsico cut in. “You don’t tell me what the story is. You don’t tell me where the story is. I follow information wherever it leads and just now the information is leading to a house in Ilford and a very unhappy teenage boy.”

So he had got to Sayyid, Barbara thought bitterly. Who bloody knew where he’d go next?

“You’re using that kid to—”

“He needed to vent. I let him vent. I needed a story. He gave me a story. This is a reciprocal relationship Sayyid and I have. Mutually beneficial. Just like yours and mine.”

“You and I have no relationship.”

“But we do. And it’s growing every day.”

Barbara felt someone tapping skeletal fingers on her spine. “Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

“For now it means I’m following a story. You might not love the direction it’s heading in. You might want to direct its course a bit. You might need to give me more information in order to do that and when you give me that information—”

“ If , not when.”

“ When ,” he repeated, “you give me that information, I’ll be happy to take a look at it or have a listen to it and I’ll decide if it constitutes a train I can climb on. That’s how it works.”

“How it works—” she began, but he cut in.

“You don’t get to decide that, Barb. At first you did, but now you don’t. Like I said, our relationship is growing. Changing. Developing. This could be a marriage made in heaven. If we both play our cards right,” he added.

The skeletal fingers felt as if they would close on her neck and choke off her breath. She said, “Watch yourself, Mitchell. Because I swear to God, if you’re threatening me, you’re going to be bloody sorry about it.”

“Threatening you?” Corsico laughed with a complete lack of humour. “That would never happen, Barb.” Then he rang off, leaving Barbara standing in Chalk Farm Road with a copy of The Source ’s latest edition in one hand, her mobile phone in the other, cars whizzing by as drivers made their way to work, and pedestrians pushing past her as they made their way to the Underground station.

She knew she ought to join the latter group. She had barely enough time to get to work in order to avoid the baleful eye and meticulous note-taking of DI John Stewart. But she needed an immediate injection of caffeine and pastry into her body in order to be able to cope—let alone think—so she decided that DI Stewart and the assignment he would doubtless give her that day—more transcription please, Sergeant, as we’re having such a time keeping up with the action reports coming in every hour—would have to wait. She ducked into a recently opened establishment called Cuppa Joe Etc. She purchased a latte and an et cetera, which in this case was a chocolate croissant. God knew she was owed both, after the conversation with Corsico.

When her mobile chimed the opening lines of “Peggy Sue” two bites into the chocolate croissant and three gulps of latte later, Barbara hoped it was Corsico having a change of mind rather than a change of heart since the bloke apparently didn’t own a heart. But it turned out to be Lynley. Barbara’s insides did flip-flops at the possibilities attendant to a phone call from him.