Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

To all of this, the Englishman remained silent, but his face was sombre. He stirred his cappuccino . So far, he’d not tasted it, so intently had he been listening to Salvatore’s tale. Now, he drank it straight down, and he broke his dolce into two pieces although he ate neither. “Forgive me for not entirely understanding how you proceed when this sort of conclusion is arrived at,” he said. “Has the public minister any evidence that supports this man’s confession or his own picture of the crime? Does he need any evidence?”

“ Sì, sì, sì ,” Salvatore told him. The magistrato ’s instructions—coming fast on the heels of Casparia’s confession—were now being followed.

“And they are?” Lynley enquired politely.

The stables where Carlo Casparia had been living rough for so long were now being sorted out by a group of scenes-of-crime officers. They would be looking for evidence of the child’s being held there for whatever period was necessary before Carlo decided what to do with her.

“Where are these stables, exactly?” Lynley asked.

They were in the Parco Fluviale, Salvatore told him. He had been intending to head there when Lynley arrived at the questura . Would the Englishman like to accompany him to see the scene?

He would indeed, Lynley told him.

It was only a brief ride round the enormous city wall to reach the quartiere of Borgo Giannotti. There, from beyond its main street with its line of busy shops, one ultimately gained access to the parco . During this ride, Lynley asked the questions that Salvatore had been anticipating as he told the tale of Carlo Casparia’s recent confession.

What about the red car? the detective enquired. What did il Pubblico Ministero think about it? And was it the magistrato ’s opinion that Casparia had given Hadiyyah over to the owner of the car, who then took Hadiyyah into the hills? And if the date on which this red car, the man, and the child had been sighted was the actual day on which Hadiyyah had gone missing . . . didn’t it then follow that Carlo Casparia would have had to know all along to whom he was going to deliver the child? Didn’t this suggest quite a degree of planning on his part? Did Signor Fanucci envision Casparia as capable of this? Did Salvatore himself envision this?

“As to the red convertible car,” Salvatore said with an approving glance at Lynley, “the magistrato knows nothing of this car. Even as you and I go to the parco to ensure his will is being carried out, one of my officers is driving into the Alps with the man who saw that car. They will attempt to identify the point at which he saw it. A search will then be conducted of the immediate area of the lay-by where the car was parked. If nothing is found, every lay-by between the village where the mother of our witness lives and the start of that road into the Alps will be searched.”

“Without the magistrate’s knowledge?”

“Sometimes,” Salvatore said, “Piero doesn’t know what’s good for Piero. I must help him realise this in the best way I can.”

LUCCA

TUSCANY

The stables in the Parco Fluviale stood perhaps a mile along the lane that skirted the springtime rush of the River Serchio and coursed through the southern section of the park. They comprised a derelict set of buildings, long unused for their intended purpose, and out in front of them a faded sign giving the costs of horse hiring had been the victim of ill-talented graffiti artists and hunters looking to practise their shooting on its surface.

A crime scene van was parked on a narrow gravel access road into the stable area, and Lo Bianco pulled next to the police tape that marked the site as inaccessible to the few journalists who had already received word that some kind of action was happening in the parco . Lo Bianco muttered when he saw them. He ignored their demands of “ Che cosa succede? ” and took Lynley into the immediate vicinity of Carlo Casparia’s home away from home.

At the moment, the activity was centred on a single stable backed by a tree-studded berm. This was situated behind a line of tangled shrubbery, most of which appeared to be wild roses coming into bloom, and it comprised a line of some dozen stalls with tall doors hanging open to display the disreputable contents within. Obviously, the entire place had been used as a dosshouse for ages by any number of people, and contained within it was so much rubbish that sorting through it all for a sign of a particular little girl’s presence was going to take weeks. Filthy mattresses lay everywhere. Used hypodermic needles, limp condoms, and discarded takeaway food containers were scattered on the ground. Plastic cartons, old clothing, and mildewed blankets formed mounds in corners, while carrier bags filled with rotting food sent into the air a foul miasma, which had attracted vast clouds of flies and gnats.

Within all of this detritus moved two crime scene officers. “ Come va? ” Lo Bianco called out.

One lowered his mask and answered, “ Merda! ” The other said nothing but shook his head. It seemed, thought Lynley, that they knew their occupation was going to be a useless one.

Lo Bianco said to Lynley, “Come with me, Ispettore . There is something more to see in this place,” and he walked to the back of the stables, where a faint trail through the tall wild grass and wildflowers led up the berm and between two chestnut trees.

Here, Lynley saw, a path had been created by dog walkers, cyclists, runners, and, perhaps, families out for a passeggiata on long summer evenings. It was well worn, and it followed along the top of the berm in both directions, mimicking the route of the lane through the parco as well as the course of the river. Lo Bianco began to walk along it. In less than one hundred yards, he broke to the left, descended another berm, crossed a wooded area thick with sycamores, alders, and beeches, and came out on the edge of a playing field.

Lynley saw at once where they were. Across the field lay a patch of gravel suitable as a small car park. To the right of this two picnic tables rested beneath the trees. In front of them and across a path was the playing field, divided by more concrete paths along which saplings grew. Far to the west of all this stood a café in which, he assumed, the parents of the children who came to this place to be coached by Lorenzo Mura might wait, enjoying refreshments as they watched their budding football players undertaking another session with the man in order to improve their skills.

Lynley looked at Lo Bianco. The chief inspector, he saw, was not the fool of Piero Fanucci, no matter what the magistrato might think in the matter.

“I wonder,” Lynley said, indicating the playing field, “if Signor Casparia might be able to ‘imagine’ something more, Chief Inspector?”

“What would this be?” Lo Bianco asked.

“We have, after all,” Lynley said, “only Lorenzo Mura’s word for it that Hadiyyah was taken from the market that day. You must have thought of that at some point.”

Lo Bianco smiled slightly. “This would be one of the reasons why I have had my own suspicions about Signor Mura,” he replied.

“Would you mind if I talked to him? About more, I mean, than merely explaining the nature of Carlo Casparia’s ‘confession.’”

“I mind not in the least,” Lo Bianco said. “ Nel frattempo , I shall be looking at the other calciatori on his team. One of them may drive a red convertible. This would, I think, be interesting to know.”

PISA

TUSCANY

As far as he was concerned, meeting anywhere near Campo dei Miracoli was lunacy since there were dozens of other places where they could have met unnoticed in the city. But it was to Campo dei Miracoli that he’d been summoned, so he went to that site of tourism run amok. He worked his way through what seemed like five hundred people taking photographs of their mates pretending to hold up the tower, and he crossed between the Duomo and the Baptistery to the cimitero behind its high and forbidding walls. He went to the room he’d been instructed to find: where several of the location’s affreschi had been moved after their restoration. No one would be there, he’d been assured. If, when the tour buses stopped and debouched their passengers at the gates to Piazza dei Miracoli, the gitanti were given forty minutes to scurry about and have their photographs taken before being carted off to the next site on their list, they weren’t about to seek out the cemetery. With its half-demolished affreschi and its one decent sculpture of a woman in repose, this place would be deserted, and they would be safe from scrutiny here.