Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

Lo Bianco sent for someone who knew what to do with memory cards from cameras, compact discs, computers, and getting the photographs onto a monitor’s screen. There turned out to be nearly two hundred that the American and her daughter had taken in the mercato . Lynley and the chief inspector began to go through them, studying each to see if Hadiyyah was featured in any, looking for the reappearance of anyone from one picture to the next. Especially they looked for Michelangelo Di Massimo. He would, after all, be unmistakable.

They found Lorenzo Mura doing his weekly shop at a bancarella featuring cheese. They found him at another featuring meat. At this one a great pig’s head on the counter looked, unappetisingly, like something directly out of Lord of the Flies , and Mura was gazing to his left in the direction, Lo Bianco said, of Porta San Jacopo and the accordion player. They scrutinised every picture that Lo Bianco identified as being in the vicinity of that musician. Finally, they came upon two in which Hadiyyah could be seen, at the front of the crowd listening to the music and watching the man’s poodle doing its dance.

The focal point of the picture was the dancing dog, not Hadiyyah, so she wasn’t entirely in focus. But it was an easy matter to enlarge the picture on the screen so that the detectives could see that it was unmistakably her. To her right stood an old woman in the black of a widow, while on her left huddled three teenage girls engaged in lighting two cigarettes from the burning tobacco of a third.

Di Massimo was nowhere. But a handsome, dark-haired man stood directly behind Hadiyyah, and although his gaze, like everyone else’s, was on the poodle and its master, he was reaching for something inside his jacket. Two pictures along they saw what it was. By enlarging it, they had a better image to deal with. It appeared to be a greeting card of some kind, on its front a depiction of the universal yellow smiley face. There was no photo showing exactly what he’d done with the card. There was, however, a picture of Hadiyyah bending to the accordion player’s basket and putting something in it with her right hand while, in her left, she held something that could have been the card from the earlier photo.

And then . . . nothing more. There were other pictures of the accordion player, of the dancing dog, and of the crowd in attendance. But Hadiyyah was not in them. Nor was the man.

“It could be nothing,” Lo Bianco said, stepping away from the monitor and going to look out of the window, which faced not only Viale Cavour but also the restless journalists gathered there.

“Do you believe that?” Lynley asked him.

Lo Bianco looked at him. “I do not,” he said.

BOW

LONDON

Winston hadn’t jumped on the rolling wagon of Barbara’s intentions immediately. She didn’t understand why until they finally reached Bow and had parked in front of Bangla Halal Grocers, where a sign offered Bangladeshi King Size Fish and two men in long white robes and tatted headgear gazed upon Barbara’s old Mini with undisguised suspicion. There, Winston didn’t unfold himself from the sagging seat at once, as Barbara had expected of him, considering the discomfort in which he’d had to ride all the way from Victoria. Instead, he said to her, “You got to be told something, Barb. He’s checkin your story.”

So caught up was she in trying to decide how she was going to make Doughty pay for his investigative crimes against her that she thought at first he meant the Bow detective. But when he went on, she understood that Winston was passing along information that had come to him via Dorothea Harriman, and this information had nothing to do with Dwayne Doughty and his questionable ethics.

“Dee says he asked her to look into where your mum was taken when she fell. She says he asked her would she do it on the sly. If no A-and-E has a record of her and no ambulance company has a record of transportin her, he’s goin to use it against you. Tha’s the story Dee had.”

Barbara swore. “Why didn’t she come to me? At least I could’ve rung Mrs. Flo to cook up a story.”

“’Spect Dee’s that worried ’bout her own job, Barb. He sees her talkin to you, he even gets word she’s talked to you, we both know what he’s goin to think. She’s bidin her time before she gets on it—the ambulance and A-and-E business—but he’s goin to be lookin for some answers soon and she’s goin to have to tell him something. And when she tells him whatever she tells him, you know ’s well as I do that he’s goin to take steps to confirm.”

Barbara thunked her head against the driver’s window. How to proceed was the question. She answered it by saying, “Hang on, then,” to Winston, and by making a phone call to Florence Magentry in Greenford. That good woman was going to have to lie for her, she was going to have to do so convincingly, and Barbara could see no way around it.

“Oh my dear, my dear,” she said hesitantly when Barbara laid out the facts for her via mobile as Winston looked on, frowning. “I will, of course, if you think I must. A fall, an ambulance, the casualty ward . . . ? Of course, of course. But, Barbara, may I say . . . ?”

Barbara girded herself for protest. She wanted to declare that she had no choice, that she had to protect herself, that if she did not do so she would not be able to keep her mother in the secure and caring place of lodging that Mrs. Flo provided because she’d be without a job. But she said, “Yeah. Go on,” and she waited for Mrs. Flo to say what she needed to say.

It was, “Sometimes, my dear, if we tempt fate this way . . . It’s not a good thing, is it? What I’m trying to say is that declaring something like this—a fall, broken bones, an ambulance, casualty—”

Barbara had never taken her mother’s carer to be superstitious, so she said, “You’re saying that wishing makes things so? Well, I’m not wishing. I’m just saying. And if I don’t ‘say’ something, I’m up to my neck . . . Look, a secretary from the Met will ring you, Mrs. Flo. Then a DI called Stewart’ll ring you as well. You just need to tell them both that yes, Mum fell, and yes, an ambulance took her to casualty, and that’s all you know since you rang me and I got onto all the rest.” That would, she thought, buy her time to sort this mess out.

Up above Bedlovers, Doughty was waiting for her, as she’d phoned him and told him that—all things related to the law considered—it was in his best interests to stay put until she and he had a little confab together. She didn’t mention Winston, and she noted with gratification that Doughty blanched slightly when the impressive black detective followed her into the room and blocked any escape from it. She introduced the two men. Winston meaningfully locked his eyeballs on to Doughty. Barbara then got down to business. The business was money transferred from Lucca to London. The business was hiring a Pisan called Michelangelo Di Massimo.

“You hired this bloke in January,” she declared. “So let’s start with how you uncovered the information about a money transfer in the first place.”

“I don’t reveal—”

“Do not attempt that rubbish with me. You’ve been playing fast and loose from the first, and if you’d like to remain a private investigator and not end up in the local nick, then you’re going to talk.”

Doughty was sitting behind his desk. He glanced at Winston, who stood at the door. He glanced at a metal filing cabinet, at the artificial plant covering its top surface. That, Barbara reckoned now, had to be where he had a camera that broadcast whatever went on in his office to his colleague in the other room.

“All right. Another bank account was uncovered,” Doughty finally said.