Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

Di Massimo plucked the book back from Salvatore’s hands. He was unrattled. He said, “As you have eyes, you can see I’m in the middle of something here, Chief Inspector.”

“Ah, yes, the hair,” Salvatore said. “It was what made you so distinctive to the hotels and pensioni , Miko.” He was aware of Lynley next to him adjusting to the new information. He felt a slight twinge that he hadn’t told the English detective from the first about what he knew of Michelangelo Di Massimo’s profession, but he didn’t want the information relayed to the parents of the girl and, from them, to Lorenzo Mura. The risk was too great, and he hadn’t known whether he could trust Lynley to hold his tongue.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Pisan said.

“What I’m talking about is your presence—in my city, Miko—seeking from one hotel to the next information about a woman from London and her daughter. You even had a photo of them. Does this rattle the cage bars of your memory, my friend, or will a trip to the questura be necessary to do so?”

“It seems someone hired you to find them, signore,” Lynley said. “And now one of them is missing, which doesn’t look good. For you, that is.”

“I know nothing of missing women and children,” Di Massimo said. “And the fact that someone thinks I was looking for them at one time or another . . . ? It could have been anyone. You know that.”

“Described such as yourself?” Salvatore asked. “Miko, how many men can be said to combine the physical attributes that blend in you so well?”

“Ask the parrucchiere ,” the Pisan advised. “Ask anyone here. They will tell you Di Massimo isn’t the only man who chooses to alter the colour of his hair.”

“ Vero ,” Salvatore said. “But perhaps the number of these men who also wear black leather”—and here he toed the plastic cape to one side to reveal Di Massimo’s trousers—“and whose whiskers sprout from his face as if in a contest to grow a full beard by this evening . . . ? I would suggest, Miko, that these two details alone set you above the others. We add to that your possession of a photo of a girl and her mother. We add to that your employment. We add to that your membership on the squadra di calcio and the fact that this team will have, from time to time, played matches against the team from Lucca . . .”

“ Calcio? ” Di Massimo asked. “What has calcio to do with anything?”

“Lorenzo Mura. Angelina Upman. The missing child. They are all connected and something has told me that you know this.”

“You’re fishing and your bait is off the hook,” Di Massimo said.

“We shall see if that’s the case, Miko, when you stand in an identity parade and the witnesses from the hotels who have identified you have a chance to see you once again. When that happens—as I assure you it will—you might then regret your reluctance to speak to us now. Il Pubblico Ministero , by the way, will be most interested in speaking to you once those witnesses have confirmed that the man who came into their hotels in his black leather trousers and his black leather jacket with his yellow hair and his very black eyebrows—”

“ Basta ,” Di Massimo snapped. “I was asked to locate them, the girl and her mother. That is all. I search Pisa first: the hotels, the pensioni , even the convents that rent out rooms. Then I broaden the search.”

“Why Lucca?” Lynley asked the man.

His eyes became hooded as he considered the question and, apparently, what it would reveal if he answered it.

“Why Lucca?” Salvatore repeated. “And who hired you, Michelangelo?”

“There was a bank transaction that I was told about. It came from Lucca, so I went to Lucca. You know how it works, Chief Inspector. One thing leads to another and the investigator follows trails. That’s it.”

“A bank transaction?” Salvatore said. “Who told you about a bank transaction? What kind of bank transaction, Miko?”

“A transfer of money. That’s all I knew. The money started in Lucca. It ended in London.”

“And who hired you?” Lynley asked the man. “When were you hired?”

“In January,” Michelangelo said.

“By whom?”

“He’s called Dwayne Doughty. He hired me to find the girl. And that, Chief Inspector, is all I know. I did a job for him. I looked for a child who was supposed to be in the company of her mother. I had a photo of them, so I did what anyone searching would do: I went to the hotels and the pensioni . If that’s a crime, arrest me now. If it isn’t, let me go back to reading my book in peace.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Lynley rang Barbara Havers as he and Lo Bianco made the trip back to Lucca. He reached her deep into attempting to transcribe an action report for an officer whose cursive she was finding illegible. She sounded irritated and in need of nicotine. For the first time Lynley wouldn’t have minded her lighting up. He knew she would need to once he imparted the information he now had about Dwayne Doughty.

There was a moment of silence when he told her: The London private investigator had hired a Pisa private investigator to track down Angelina Upman and her daughter in Lucca. This investigator had begun his work for Doughty in January, four months earlier. To her “Bloody hell, he lied to me!” Lynley added that a bank account was involved, as was a transfer of money from Lucca to London. “Doughty has apparently known a great deal more than he’s been telling you, Barbara,” Lynley said.

“He’s working for me,” she fumed. “He’s bloody goddamn working for me!”

“You’ll need to have a word.”

“Oh, I bloody know that,” she barked. “When I get my hands on the sodding worm—”

“Just don’t do it now. Don’t leave the office. And if I might suggest . . . ?”

“What? Because if you think I’m handing this little matter over to someone else, you’re bleeding from your ears.”

“I wasn’t heading there,” he told her. “But you might want to take Winston with you if you’re going to confront this bloke.”

“I don’t need protection, Inspector.”

“Believe me, I know. But the cachet of authority that Winston will lend to an interview . . . ? Not to mention the implied threat of his presence . . . ? You do need that. These aren’t the most cooperative of blokes, Barbara. Doughty might need convincing in the matter of talking if he’s been hiding details from you.”

She agreed to this, and they rang off. Lynley told Lo Bianco who Doughty was and how he had fitted into the search for Hadiyyah from the previous November. Lo Bianco whistled and shot him a look. “For an Englishman to have taken the child,” he said, “this would have been an easier matter.”

“Only as to language,” Lynley pointed out. “Because if the Englishman doesn’t live in Lucca or somewhere nearby . . . Where would he have taken her?”

At the questura , they quickly learned that there was an additional development. As it happened, a tourist using a local apartment in Piazza San Alessandro as a base for her trip to Tuscany had been in the mercato on the day of Hadiyyah’s disappearance. She was an American woman travelling with her daughter, both of them students of the Italian language, neither of them fluent, but both in town to practise as much as they could. So they read the tabloids as well as the newspapers, they watched the television and tried to understand what was being said, and they talked to the cittadini of the town. They’d seen the appeal on the news, and they’d looked through the thousand or more digital photos they’d taken in Tuscany to see if there was anything among them that might be of help to the police. They’d located the photos they’d taken in the mercato on the day that the child went missing, and they’d cooperatively delivered the memory cards from their digital cameras so that the police could examine the pictures. They’d included a message along with the memory cards: Should the police wish to question the photographers themselves, they would be that day taking in the beauties of Palazzo Pfanner.