Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

“Your cousin Roberto Squali would have told you to keep the child safe,” Lo Bianco said. “He would not have told you to harm the child. You were to keep her until he came for her. Do you know your cousin Roberto is dead?”

She frowned. For a moment she said nothing, and Lynley thought that the news alone might loosen her tongue as to the whereabouts of Hadiyyah. But then she said, surprisingly, that it was the will of God that she should have witnessed what happened to Roberto. She, too, had thought her cousin was dead because God had clearly taken his car from the road and sent it soaring into the air. But the ambulanza had come for him and she’d understood from this that patience was required when one sought to understand the greater meanings behind God’s hand in one’s life.

“ Pazza ,” Captain Mirenda said tersely. Her voice was low, and if Domenica heard this declaration, she said nothing in reply to it. Slings and arrows couldn’t hurt her now. Obviously, she’d moved to an unearthly realm in which the Almighty had blessed her.

“You witnessed this accident to your cousin?” Lo Bianco said.

That, too, was God’s will, Domenica told him.

“And then you wondered what next to do with the child you were supposed to be keeping for him, vero ?” Lo Bianco clarified.

All that was required was to do God’s will.

Captain Mirenda’s expression said that she wished God’s will to be that she herself should throttle the young woman. Lo Bianco’s looked only marginally different. Lynley said to Domenica, “What was God’s will?”

“Abraham,” she told him. “Deliver your beloved son to God.”

“But Isaac did not die,” Lo Bianco said.

“God sent an angel to stop the sword from falling,” Domenica said. “One only has to wait for God. God will always speak if the soul is pure. This, too, I prayed to know: how to purify and ready the soul for God so that the state of grace we all seek to be in at the moment of death could be acquired.”

The moment of death was enough to spur Lo Bianco to action. He went to the young woman, grasped her arm, and said, “God’s will is this ,” in a voice that boomed in the stone walls of the place. “You will take us to this child at once, wherever she is. God would not have sent us into the Alps to find her if God did not intend her to be found. You understand this, sì ? You understand how God works? We must have that child. God has sent us for her.”

Lynley thought the young woman might protest, but she did not. She also did not appear cowed by the demand or its ferocity. Instead, she said, “ Certo ,” and seemed happy to comply. She headed for the great doors of the barn.

Once outside she went to a stairway that climbed to a door on the barn’s south side. The others followed her up these stairs and into a dimly lit kitchen, where the sight of fresh, bright vegetables in an ancient stone sink and the fragrance of newly baked bread acted as a mocking contrast to what they understood they were about to find in this place.

She approached a door on the far side of the room, and from her pocket she withdrew a key. Lynley girded himself for whatever was behind the door, and when she said, “The waters of God washed away her sins, and her purity made her ready for Him,” he saw Captain Mirenda cross herself and he heard Lo Bianco give a quiet curse.

Domenica didn’t cross the threshold of the room beyond the door. Instead, she welcomed them to do so. They hesitated, and Domenica smiled. “ Andate ,” she urged them, as if eager for them to see what God’s handmaiden had done in the name of Abraham.

“ Dio mio ” was Lo Bianco’s murmur as he passed the young woman and entered the room.

Lynley followed him, but Captain Mirenda did not. She would, he knew, want to prevent Domenica Medici from fleeing the scene. But Domenica made no move to do so. Instead, as the two men entered a small chamber furnished with only a narrow bed, a small chest of drawers, and a prie-dieu, she said, “ Vuole suo padre ,” and the little girl cowering in the corner of the room repeated this declaration in English.

“I want my dad,” Hadiyyah said to them. She began to cry in great heaving sobs. “Please can you take me to my dad?”

VILLA RIVELLI

TUSCANY

Salvatore allowed DI Lynley to carry the little girl from the place. She was gowned in white from head to toe, like a child dressed for a Christmas pageant, and she clung to him, burying her face in his neck.

The Englishman had crossed the room to her in three steps. He’d said, “Hadiyyah, I’m Thomas Lynley. Barbara has sent me to find you,” and she’d held out her arms like a much younger child, trust established at once by his use of English and by the mention of this name. Salvatore did not know who this person was, this Barbara. But if it served to comfort the child in some way to hear her name spoken, he was more than happy to have Lynley invoke it.

“Where is he? Where’s my dad?” the child wailed.

Lynley picked her up, and she clung to him, thin legs round his waist, thin arms round his shoulders. “Barbara’s in London waiting for you,” he told the child. “Your father’s in Lucca. Shall I take you to him? Would you like that?”

“But that’s what he said . . .” And she cried anew, somehow not comforted by the idea of being taken to her father but rather terrified anew in some way.

Lynley carried her outside and down the stone steps. At their bottom a rustic table and four chairs stood in a square of bright sunlight. He set the girl on one of these chairs and drew a second chair close to her. Gently, he smoothed her chestnut hair, saying, “What did he say to you, Hadiyyah? Who?”

“The man said he’d take me to my dad,” she told him. “I want my dad. I want Mummy. She put me in water. I didn’t want it and I tried to stop her but I couldn’t and then she locked me up and . . .” She wept and wept. “I wasn’t scared at first ’cause he said my dad . . . But she made me go into the cellar . . .”

The story came in fits and starts and from it Salvatore picked up snatches and the rest was translated by Lynley as the little girl spoke, telling the tale of what in her confused mind Domenica Medici had determined to be the will of God. A visit to the cellar clarified matters further, for deep within the labyrinthine shadowy place was an ancient marble bathing pool in which disturbingly green and cloudy water had waited for the immersion of a frightened child, baptising her and washing away whatever “sins” stained her soul and made her less pleasing to the sight of God. Once she’d been thus baptised, locking her away was the only manner in which her keeper Domenica could assure her continued purity while she herself awaited the next sign from God to tell her what to do with the child.

When Salvatore saw the place to which Domenica Medici had dragged the little English girl, he understood the screaming that had brought the carabinieri to the convent. For the vast and vaulted cellar of the Villa Rivelli would be a place of nightmares for any child, with one crypt-like chamber giving onto another, with looming dusty disused wine barrels the size of military tanks in rows, with ancient olive presses looking like instruments of torture . . . It was no wonder that Hadiyyah had screamed in terror. There was more than a good chance that she would wake up screaming from her dreams for a very long time to come.

It was time to get her out of this place and back to her parents. He said to Lynley, “ Dobbiamo portarla a Lucca all’ospedale ,” for Hadiyyah would have to be examined by a doctor and spoken to by a specialist in childhood trauma if one could be found whose English was adequate.