Elizabeth George - Just One Evil Act

“Mitchell, why the hell are you doing this?”

“We had an agreement. Quarter of an hour. That was . . . how many hours ago exactly?”

“It might interest you that I’m working, Mitchell. It might interest you to know that I’m about to break this case wide open. It might be a grand idea for you to stay on my good side because when the story’s ready for—”

“You should have told me, Barb.”

“I don’t report to you, in case you haven’t noticed. I report to my guv.”

“You should have given me something. That’s how this game is played. And you know that . If you didn’t want to play, you shouldn’t have climbed into my sandbox. D’you understand?”

“I’m going to give you . . .” The lift arrived. It was filled to capacity. She couldn’t continue the conversation. She said, “We c’n sort this out. Just tell me that there’re no dates involved, and we’re back in business.”

“On the pictures, you mean? Are the dates removed from the pictures?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“And can I guess why that’s important to you?”

“Oh, I expect you can work that one out. Are you going to answer me?”

There was a moment. She was in the lift and the doors were closing and she was in terror that either he wouldn’t reply or they’d be cut off.

But he finally said, “No dates, Barb. I gave you that much. We’ll call it a sign of good faith.”

“Right,” she said as she rang off. They would definitely call it something.

LUCCA

TUSCANY

Hadiyyah wanted Lynley to sit in the back seat of the police car with her, and he was happy to oblige. Lo Bianco phoned ahead to the hospital in Lucca, and he then notified Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar that Hadiyyah had been found at a Dominican convent in the Apuan Alps, that she was alive and well, and that she would be at the hospital within ninety minutes for a general exam. If they would be so good as to meet DI Lynley and himself at this location . . . ?

“ Niente, niente ,” he murmured into the mobile, an apparent brushing off of copious expressions of gratitude from the other end. “ È il mio lavoro, Signora .”

In the back seat, Lynley kept Hadiyyah tucked next to him, which seemed to be her preference. Considering the length of time that she’d been held at Villa Rivelli, she did not appear to be the worse for the experience, at least superficially. Sister Domenica Giustina, as Hadiyyah called Domenica Medici, had taken good care of her. Up until the last few days, the child had apparently had the run of the villa’s grounds. It was only in the end that she had become frightened, Hadiyyah said. It was only when Sister Domenica Giustina took her into the cellar to that mouldy, smelly, creepy chamber with the slippery and slimy marble pool in the floor that she had known the slightest bit of terror.

“You’re a very brave girl,” Lynley said to her. “Most girls your age—most boys as well—would have been frightened from the very start. Why weren’t you, Hadiyyah? Can you tell me? Do you remember how all of this began? What can you tell me?”

She looked up at him. He was struck by how pretty a child she was, everything attractive in both of her parents blending together to form her innocent beauty. Her delicate eyebrows knotted as she heard his questions, though. Her eyes filled with tears, possibly at the realisation that she might well have done something wrong. Every child knew the rules, after all: Don’t go anywhere with a stranger, no matter what that stranger says to you. And both he and Hadiyyah knew that that was what she had done. He said quietly, “There’s no right or wrong here, by the way. There’s just what happened. You know I’m a policeman, of course, and I hope you know that Barbara and I are very good friends, yes?”

She nodded solemnly.

“Brilliant. My job is to find out what happened. That’s it. Nothing else. Can you help me, Hadiyyah?”

She looked down at her lap, “He said my dad was waiting for me. I was in the market with Lorenzo and I was watching the accordion man near the porta and he said ‘Hadiyyah, this is from your father. He is waiting to see you beyond the city wall.’”

“‘This is from your father’?” Lynley repeated. “Did he speak English or Italian to you?”

“English.”

“And what was from your father?”

“A card.”

“Like . . . a greeting card, perhaps?” Lynley thought of the pictures they had from the tourists in the mercato , Roberto Squali with a card in his hand, then Hadiyyah with something similar in hers. “What did the card say?”

“It said to go with the man. It said not to be afraid. It said he would bring me to him, to my dad.”

“And was it signed?”

“It said ‘Dad.’”

“Was it in your father’s handwriting, Hadiyyah? D’you think you would recognise his handwriting?”

Slowly she sucked in on her lip. She looked up at him, and her great dark eyes began to spill tears onto her cheeks. In this, Lynley had his answer. She was nine years old. How often had she even seen her father’s handwriting and why would she ever be expected to remember what it looked like? He put his arm round her and pulled her closer to him. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said again, this time pressing his lips to her hair. “I expect you’ve missed your father badly. I expect you’d very much like to see him.”

She nodded, tears still dribbling down her face.

“Right. Well. He’s here in Italy. He’s waiting for you. He’s been trying to find you since you went missing.”

“ Khushi ,” she said against his shoulder.

Lynley frowned. He repeated the word. He asked her what it meant and she told him happiness . It was what her father always called her.

“He said khushi ,” she told him with trembling lips. “He called me khushi .”

“The man with the card?”

“Dad said he’d come at Christmas hols, see, but then he didn’t.” She began to weep harder. “He kept saying ‘soon, khushi , soon’ in his emails. I thought he came as a big surprise for me and was waiting for me and the man said we had to drive to him so I got in the car. We drove and drove and drove and he took me to Sister Domenica Giustina and Dad wasn’t there .” She sobbed and Lynley comforted her as best he could, no expert in the ways of little girls. “Bad, bad, bad,” she wept. “I did bad. I made trouble for everyone. I’m bad .”

“Not in the least,” Lynley said. “Look at how brave you’ve been from the start. You weren’t frightened and that’s a very good thing.”

“He said Dad was on his way,” she wailed. “He said to wait and Dad would come.”

“I see how it happened,” Lynley told her. He stroked her hair. “You did brilliantly, Hadiyyah, from beginning to end and you’re not to blame. You’ll remember that, won’t you? You are not to blame.” For at that point, Lynley thought, what else was the child to do but wait for her father? She had no idea where Squali had taken her. There was no nearby house to which she could have run. Inside the cloister, the nuns might have seen her but they assumed she was a relative of their caretaker. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary to them, for the child played on the villa’s grounds. If she acted like anything at all, what she didn’t act like was a kidnap victim.

He fished his handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it into Hadiyyah’s small hands. He met the gaze of Lo Bianco in the rearview mirror. He could see what the chief inspector was thinking: They needed to get their hands on that card Squali had given the child, and they needed to find the connection between him and anyone who knew Hadiyyah’s nickname was khushi .