Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

“What? Exactly what don’t you know?”

“It was a . . . come si dice? A caution,” he said. “No. A pre caution. It seemed wise for me not to know where she was being kept, so that if the police traced me—which, as I’ve told you, they did—I could give them nothing of substance no matter how long they decided to question me.”

“So for all you know,” Doughty said, “she could be dead. This . . . this messenger of yours might have snatched her and killed her. She might have not been a cooperative victim of your garden kidnapping on the street, and she might well have raised a ruckus. He could have stuffed her into the boot of his car for all you know and she might have suffocated and there he was with a dead body on his hands.”

“This did not happen. It would not have happened.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“My selection of . . . this messenger, let us call him . . . was carefully done. He has known from the first that complete payment for his services depends entirely on the condition of the child and on her safety at all times.”

“So where is he? Where is she? What’s happened?”

“This is what I’m now attempting to discover. I’ve telephoned, but so far I have heard not a word.”

“Which means something’s gone wrong. You know that, don’t you?”

“ Sì . Sono d’accordo ,” the other murmured. “I ask you to believe that I am attempting to discover exactly what this is. But even in this, I must proceed with caution because the police will be watching me.”

“I don’t care if the bloody Swiss Guards are watching you,” Doughty said. “I want that kid found. I want her found today.”

“I doubt that will be possible,” he admitted. “Until I find the messenger sent to fetch her, I will know nothing more than you.”

“Then goddamn bloody find the messenger!” Doughty roared. “Because if I have to come to Italy myself, you aren’t going to be happy about it.”

That said, he snapped the mobile phone in half. He was on the bridge that carried Gunmakers Lane over the Hertford Union Canal. He cursed and threw the broken pieces of the mobile into the murky water there. He watched them sink and hoped against hope that they weren’t a metaphor for what was going on in his life.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Salvatore Lo Bianco made the requisite offer of help to his mamma. As usual she refused. No one, she told him—also as usual—would ever wash and polish the marble cover of his father’s grave during what remained of the lifetime of his devoted wife. No, no, no, figlio mio , this chore will take no longer than is required for my old body to hobble round the plot itself, wielding soap and water and rags and marble polish and more rags till the stone reflects this ancient, sorrowing face of mine as well as the sky with its glorious clouds above me. You may watch, however, figlio mio , so that you will learn how to care for this stone where my poor corpse will lie with your father’s after my earthly days are done.

Salvatore told her that perhaps he would walk, instead. He would follow the path round the perimeter of this part of the cemetery. He needed to think a bit. She could call out to him if she needed help. He would not be far away.

Mamma gave a quintessential Italian mamma shrug. He could, of course, please himself in this matter. Sons so often did just that, didn’t they? And then she turned and said, “ Ciao, Giuseppe, marito carissimo, ” and told the dead man how deeply she missed him, how every moment of every day brought her closer to joining him in the ground. After this, she began her work upon the grave.

Salvatore watched her and stifled a chuckle. There were certain moments in their life together, he thought, when his mamma was not his real mamma at all but rather a caricature of an Italian mamma. This was one of them. For the truth of the matter was that Teresa Lo Bianco had spent what Salvatore knew of her married life absolutely furious with his father. She’d been one of those breathtaking Italian beauties who married young and lost her looks to childbearing and a lifetime of household drudgery, and she’d never forgiven or forgotten that fact. Except, of course, when she came to the Cimitero Urbano di Lucca. Then, the instant that Salvatore parked in front of the great gates to the place, his mamma’s face transformed from its habitual look of pinched irritation to an expression that mixed grief and piety so superbly that had anyone other than Salvatore seen her, she would appear as a recent widow whose loss would never be assuaged.

He smiled. He folded a piece of chewing gum into his mouth, and he began to walk. He was halfway round his first circumambulation of the quadrangle of graves decorated with saints and the Virgin and her Son when his mobile rang. He glanced at the number of whoever was placing the call.

The Englishman, he thought. He liked this man Lynley. He’d thought the Londoner would be an irritating interloper into the Italian investigation, but this hadn’t proved to be the case.

His pronto was answered in the other detective’s careful Italian. Lynley was ringing to tell him that the mother of the kidnapped girl was in hospital. “I wasn’t sure if you’d know this,” Lynley told him. He went on to say that when he’d seen her two days earlier at the fattoria , she’d been very weak and yesterday she had grown even weaker. “Signor Mura insisted she go to hospital, for a check-over at least,” Lynley said. “I didn’t disagree.”

Lynley told him, then, of his conversations with both Lorenzo Mura and Angelina Upman. He spoke of a man who’d been at the fattoria , purportedly to purchase a donkey foal. A thick envelope had passed between this man and Lorenzo, and this was the payment, Lorenzo had claimed. But the British detective had begun to wonder about this exchange. What was the Mura family’s financial situation? What was Lorenzo’s own? And what could that mean?

Salvatore could see where Lynley was heading with this line of thought. For what Lorenzo Mura wished to do with his family’s old villa, vast amounts of money would be required. His extended family were fairly wealthy—they had always been so—but he himself was not. Would they leap to assist him if the young child of his lover was endangered and a ransom demand was made? Perhaps. But no ransom demand had been made, which suggested there was no involvement on Lorenzo’s part in the disappearance of Angelina’s daughter.

“Yet there might be reasons other than money that he would wish for Hadiyyah’s removal from her mother’s life,” Lynley noted.

“That would make the man a monster.”

“I’ve seen monsters aplenty in my time and I expect you have as well,” Lynley said.

“I have not entirely removed Lorenzo Mura from my thoughts,” Salvatore admitted. “Perhaps it is time for us—you and I—to speak with Carlo Casparia. Piero has had him ‘imagine’ how this crime was committed. Perhaps he can ‘imagine’ more about that day in the mercato when the child disappeared.”

He told the Englishman that he would come for him at the inner city gate where they had met before. At the moment, he was at the cimitero comunale , he explained, paying monthly respects to his papà’s grave. “In an hour, Ispettore ?” he said to Lynley.

“ Aspetterò ,” Lynley told him. He would meet Salvatore at the gate.

And so he was waiting. Salvatore fetched Lynley at Porta di Borgo, where the detective was reading Prima Voce again. Carlo Casparia was all over the front page another time. His family had been located in Padova. Much was being made of their estrangement from their only son. This would keep Prima Voce busy for at least two days, printing stories of Carlo’s fall from favour. Meantime, Salvatore thought, the police could get work done without concern that the tabloid might get too close to what they were doing.