Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

LUCCA

TUSCANY

“Castro’s a nonstarter” were Barbara Havers’s words to Lynley.

His words to her were “She’s pregnant, Barbara.”

To which she said, “Bloody sodding hell. How’s Azhar coping?”

“He’s difficult to read.” Lynley was careful on this topic. There was little point, he reckoned, in causing Barbara grief should her feelings for the Pakistani man be deeper than she generally pretended. “I’d say the news is a shock.”

“What about Mura?”

“Obviously, he knows.”

“I mean is he happy? Worried? Suspicious?”

“About what, exactly?”

She told him what she’d learned about Angelina Upman from her former lover Castro. She passed on his allusion to the fact that there might be yet another lover in Italy, beyond Lorenzo Mura. According to Castro, it was all part of the excitement she seemed to require, Barbara told him. Anyone there who might fill the bill as Angelina’s little bit on the side?

He’d have to look into it, Lynley told her. Was there anything else he needed to know?

She said nothing for a few moments, which told him there was something more. He said her name in a way that he knew would tell her it was in her best interests to fess up immediately since he would find out eventually. She revealed to him that The Source had generated another story, this one about Azhar’s desertion of his family in Ilford. She added, “But it’s nothing I can’t control,” which told him volumes about what she’d been up to with the tabloid, despite her protestations on the matter.

He said, “Barbara . . .”

She said, “I know, I know. Believe me, Winnie’s given me chapter and verse.”

“If you persist—”

“Well, I’ve started something now and I’ve got to stop it, sir.”

Lynley didn’t know how she could. No one got between the sheets with The Source and emerged with their clothing still ironed. She should have known that. He cursed quietly.

They rang off soon after, and he considered her words about Angelina Upman. He would have to look for another lover, someone who wanted her enough to punish her if she wouldn’t leave Mura for him.

He’d taken the call from Barbara on Lucca’s great wall, where he’d gone to walk its perimeter and to think. He’d chosen a clockwise direction and was midway around it, at the point where a café stood offering refreshments to the scores of people who were also taking exercise up above the medieval town. He decided to stop for a coffee, and he moved towards the tables spread out beneath the leafy trees. He saw that Taymullah Azhar had evidently had the same idea. For the London professor was already at a table with a pot of tea next to him and a newspaper spread out before him.

It would probably be an English-language paper, since Lynley had already seen them on sale at a kiosk in Piazza dei Cocomeri, which adjoined one of the few uncurving streets in the town. He reckoned it was a local paper for visitors, and so it seemed to be. He gave a quick look at it as he asked Azhar if he could join him. The Grapevine , it was called—more a magazine than a paper—and he saw that either Azhar or the local police had managed to get a story about Hadiyyah’s disappearance into it. Her picture was there, along with the simple headline Missing . This was good, he thought. Every avenue was being used to find her.

He wondered if Azhar knew that, in London, The Source was exposing the story of his family situation. He said nothing to him about it. Chances were good he was going to be told by someone eventually. Lynley didn’t see the point of that someone being himself.

Azhar folded the paper and moved his chair to accommodate Lynley’s bringing another to the table. Lynley ordered a coffee, sat, and gazed at the other man. He said, “The television appeal will turn up something. There’ll be dozens of phone calls to the police, and most of them will be rubbish. But one of them, perhaps two or three, will give us something. Meantime, Barbara is continuing to work several angles in England. There’s hope, Azhar.”

Azhar nodded. Lynley reckoned that the other man knew how hope grew dimmer as each day passed. But that hope could be renewed in an instant. All it would take was a single person making a connection with something he’d seen or heard, without even knowing before the television appeal that he’d seen or heard it. That was the nature of an investigation. A memory got jogged along the way.

He told all this to Hadiyyah’s father, who nodded again. Then he said to Azhar, “None of us knew she’s pregnant. Now that we do know . . .” He hesitated.

Azhar had no expression on his face. He said, “Yes?”

“It’s something that has to be taken on board. Along with everything else.”

“And the relevance . . . ?”

Lynley looked away. The café was situated on one of the ramparts of Lucca’s wall, and beyond it a group of children kicked a football on the lawn, shoving one another and laughing, slipping in the grass, shouting out. No adult was with them. They thought they were safe. Children usually did.

He said, “If, perhaps, it’s not Lorenzo’s child . . .”

“Whose else would it be? She left me for him. He’s giving to her what I would not.”

“On the surface it seems so. But because she was with Mura while she was with you, there’s a chance that now she’s with him, perhaps another man exists for her.”

Azhar shook his head. “She would not.”

Lynley considered what he knew of Angelina and what Azhar knew of the woman. People didn’t change their colours rapidly, he knew. Where she had strayed once for the excitement of having a secret lover, she could stray again. But he didn’t argue the point.

Azhar said, “I should have expected this.”

“Expected . . . ?”

“The pregnancy. The fact that she left me. I should have understood that she would move on when I did not give her what she wanted.”

“What was that?”

“First that I divorce Nafeeza. When I would not, then that Hadiyyah could at least meet her siblings. When I would not allow that, then that we should have another child. To these things I said no and no and absolutely no. I should have seen what the result would be. I drove her to all of this. What else, really, was she to do? We were happy, she and I. We had each other and we had Hadiyyah. She’d said at first that marriage was something unimportant to her. But then it changed. Or she changed. Or I did. I don’t know.”

“She might not have changed at all,” Lynley told him. “Could it be that you never really saw her well? People are sometimes blind to others. They believe what they want to believe about them because to believe something else . . . It’s far too painful.”

“And you mean . . . ?”

There was no choice but to tell him, Lynley thought. He said, “Azhar, she had another lover, Esteban Castro, while she was with you. She asked me not to tell you, but we’re at the point where every possible avenue needs to be travelled and her other lovers comprise one of those avenues.”

He said stiffly, “Where? When?”

“As I said, when she was with you.”

Lynley saw him swallow. “Because I would not—”

“No. I don’t think so. I think, perhaps, she preferred things this way. Having more than one man at a time. Tell me. Was she with someone else when you first met her?”

“Yes, but she left him. For me. She left him.” But for the first time, he sounded doubtful. He glanced at Lynley. “So you’re saying that now if there’s another man, beyond Lorenzo, and if Lorenzo knows this, has discovered this . . . But what has any of this to do with Hadiyyah? That I do not see, Inspector.”