Just One Evil Act (39 page)

Salvatore felt a wave of nausea. “What,” he asked evenly, “was to happen next?”

Di Massimo didn’t know. He only received bits and pieces of the plan when and as he needed to know them. And that was how it had worked from the first.

“Whose plan was this, then?” Salvatore asked.

“I’ve already said. A man from London.”

Lynley stirred in his chair. “Are you saying that from the first, a man from London hired you to kidnap Hadiyyah?”

Di Massimo shook his head. No, no, and no. As he’d told them before, he had been hired first merely to find the child. It was only after she had been found that he was then later asked to arrange for her kidnapping. He hadn’t wanted to do it—a
bambina
should never be separated from her mamma,
vero
? But when he’d been told about how this particular mamma had once abandoned this same child for a year to chase after a lover . . . This was not right, this was not good, this was not the
comportamento
of a good mamma, no? So he had agreed to snatch the child. For money, of course. Which, by the way, he had not yet received in full. So much for trusting the word of a foreigner.

“This foreigner was . . . ?” Lynley asked.

“Dwayne Doughty, as I’ve said from the first. The plan from start to finish was his. Why he wanted the child to be taken instead of merely reunited with her papà . . . ? This I do not know and I did not ask.”

VILLA RIVELLI

TUSCANY

Sister Domenica Giustina was harvesting strawberries when she was summoned. She was using scissors to cut the fruit from the plants. She was humming an Ave
that she particularly liked, and its sweet air moved her among her plants with a lightness of gait that she hadn’t known in all the time she had been in this place.

Her long period of punishment was ended. She’d bathed and clothed herself anew, using upon her many wounds an ointment she herself had made. These wounds would cease their suppurating soon. Such were the loving ways of God.

When she heard her name called, she rose from the strawberries. She saw that a novice had come from the convent, the fresh breeze stirring her pure white veil. Sister Domenica Giustina recognised the young woman, although she did not know her name. A badly repaired cleft palate had left her face uneven, giving her the appearance of permanent sorrow. She was no more than twenty-three years old. That she was at this age a novice in the order of nuns spoke to how long she had lived among them.

She said, “You’re wanted inside, Domenica. You’re to come at once.”

Sister Domenica Giustina’s spirit leapt like a doe within her. She had not been inside the holy body of the convent in years, not since the day she’d learned she would not be allowed to live among the good sisters who were immured in sanctity there. She’d only been permitted a few steps inside the kitchen on the
pianoterra
. Five paces from the door to the huge pine table where she left for the nuns whatever she’d gleaned from the garden, made from the milk of the goats, or gathered from the chickens. And even then she entered only when no one else was present. That she knew this particular nun—her summoner—by her appearance was owing to having seen her arrive in the company of her parents on a summer day.

“
Mi segua
,” the novice told Sister Domenica Giustina. She turned, expecting the other woman to follow.

Sister Domenica Giustina did as she had been told. She would have preferred to wash the dirt from her hands, perhaps to change her clothes. But to be asked into the convent—for surely that was the intention, no?—was a gift from which she could not turn. So she brushed off her hands, shook off her linen shift, clasped a pocketed rosary in her fingers, and followed the nun.

They went in through the great front doors, another gift to Sister Domenica Giustina and surely a sign as well. These gave onto what had once been the immense
soggiorno
of the villa, a reception room whose walls soared up to a fresco in which the magnificent god Apollo drove a chariot across an azure sky. Far beneath him, what
affreschi
had decorated the walls had long ago been whitewashed over. And whatever great silk-covered
divani
had been positioned to accommodate guests to the villa were ages gone and replaced by simple wooden pews that fanned out in front of an equally simple and rough-hewn altar. This was covered by fine, starched linen. On it stood an elaborate tabernacle of gold, accompanied by a single candle encased in red glass. The candle in red indicated that the Sacrament was present. They genuflected before it.

The air was tinctured by the unmistakable scent of incense, a heady fragrance that Sister Domenica Giustina had not smelled in many years. She was pleased when the other woman told her to wait in this place. She nodded, knelt upon the hard tiles of the floor, and crossed herself.

She found she couldn’t pray. There was too much to see, too much to experience. She tried to discipline herself, but her excitement was great, and it drove her gaze first here and then there as she took in the place where she’d been left.

The chapel was dark, its windows covered by both shutters and grilles. The great doors to the loggia at the rear of the villa and behind the altar were boarded, and tapestries made by the fingers of the women within this place hung from these boards and presented scenes from the life of St. Dominic, namesake of the order of nuns who celebrated him in their needlework. Corridors led to the right and to the left from the chapel, taking one into the heart of the convent. Sister Domenica Giustina longed to wander along them, but she remained. Obedience was one of the vows. This moment was a test, and she would pass it.

“
Vieni, Domenica
.”

The voice asking her to come was barely a whisper, and for a moment Sister Domenica Giustina thought the Blessed Virgin herself had spoken. But a hand on her shoulder told her the voice was not disembodied, and she looked up to see an ancient lined face nearly hidden within the folds of a black veil.

Sister Domenica Giustina rose. The old nun nodded and, hands tucked into the sleeves of her habit, she turned and made for one of the corridors. Its opening was covered by an intricate lattice of wood, but this moved inward upon the slightest push and soon enough Sister Domenica Giustina and her companion were in a whitewashed corridor with closed heavy doors along one side and shuttered windows along the other. A few paces took them to one of the doors upon which the
vecchia
knocked softly. Someone spoke behind it. The old nun indicated that Sister Domenica Giustina was to enter, and when she had done so, the door was closed behind her.

She was in an office, simply furnished. A prie-dieu stood before a statue of the Virgin, who gazed lovingly down upon anyone wishing to pray at her feet. Across from her, St. Dominic held out his hands in blessing from a niche. Between two shuttered windows stood an uncluttered desk. At this desk sat the woman Sister Domenica Giustina had met only twice: She was Mother Superior, and she looked upon Sister Domenica Giustina with an expression of such gravity that Sister Domenica Giustina knew the moment of import had arrived.

She’d never felt such joy. She could sense it blazing out of her face because she could feel it coursing throughout her body. She had indeed been a terrible sinner, but now she had finally been forgiven. She had fully prepared her soul for God, and not only her own but the soul of another.

For years she had been penitent. She had striven to illustrate to God, through her actions, that she understood how weighty her sins had been. To pray that an unborn child—the child of her own cousin Roberto—would be taken from her body so that her parents would never learn she had carried it . . . To have that prayer granted on the very night that her parents were gone from the house . . . To have Roberto there to dispose of what had been forced so painfully from her body there in the darkness of the bathroom . . .

It had been alive, fully formed and alive, but even this matter had felt the hand of God. For a mere five months inside her had not been enough for it to live without help and that help had been denied. Or so she had come to believe because Roberto had it, Roberto had taken it, and Roberto had disposed of it. Girl or boy, she did not know. She had never known . . . until everything changed, until Roberto had made everything change.

Sister Domenica Giustina did not realise she had spoken all of this aloud until Mother Superior rose from behind her desk. She leaned upon it, her knuckles a stark white contrast to the colour of the wood, and she murmured, “
Madre di Dio
,
Domenica
.
Madre di Dio.
”

So, yes and yes, the child from her body had
not
died because God worked in ways too miraculous for His humble servants ever to understand. Her cousin had returned their child into her keeping to shelter her from harm, and this is what Sister Domenica Giustina had done, up until the moment when God took the girl’s father in a terrible accident among the Alps. And she—Sister Domenica Giustina—was left to try to understand what this meant. For beyond the miraculous, God also worked in incomprehensible ways and one had to struggle to understand the messages contained within His works.

“We all must prove ourselves to God,” Sister Domenica Giustina concluded. “She asked me for her papà. God told me what to do. For only by doing His will—no matter how difficult—do we achieve the complete forgiveness we seek.” She crossed herself. She smiled and she felt beatific, blessed by God at last to come into this place.

Mother Superior was breathing shallowly. Her fingers touched the golden ring she wore. They pressed against the crucifix upon it as if asking the martyred Lord for the strength to speak. “For the love of God, Domenica,” she said. “What have you done to this child?”

VICTORIA

LONDON

A
heads-up is always nice, I reckon, so you’re getting one.”

Barbara Havers didn’t need Mitchell Corsico to identify himself. At this point his tenor tones had become a permanent echo inside her skull. Had he rung her on her mobile, she could have avoided the call. As it was, he’d rung her at work, claimed to have information on “the situation DS Havers is investigating,” and the bluff had proved perfectly efficacious. The call had come through, Barbara had picked it up, she’d barked, “DS Havers,” and there he was.

She said, “What?
What?
”

“As my sainted mum would say, ‘Don’t take that tone with me,’” he returned. “She’s out of hospital.”

“Who? Your mum? So you should celebrate, shouldn’t you? I’d tipple back one or two with you, but I’ve work to do.”

“Don’t try to be amusing, Barb. There’s no story over here, and I expect you bloody well knew that. Do you have any idea what position this puts me in with my editor?
Do
you?”

He was in Italy at last. Barbara thanked her stars. “If she’s
out
of hospital, I expect that confirms that she was
in
hospital,” she replied. “It’s not down to me that she’s been released. What I gave you, I gave you in good faith.”

“I’m going with the Love Rat Dad and Officer of the Met,” he said. “Complete with pictures. Expect it tomorrow. I’ve already written it, it’s attached to my breathless email on the topic of what-hot-information-I’ve-just-managed-to-uncover-dear-editor, and I’m about to hit send. Do you want that to happen or not?”

“What I want—” Barbara looked up as someone came to stand in front of her desk. It was Dorothea Harriman, so she said to Corsico, “Hang on,” and then to Dorothea, “Something up?”

“You’re wanted, Detective Sergeant Havers.” She tilted her perfectly coiffed blond head in the general direction of Isabelle Ardery’s office. Barbara sighed.

“Right,” she said, and then to Corsico, “We’ll have to have this conversation later.”

“Are you completely mad?” he demanded. “Do you think I’m bluffing? The only way for you to stop this is to give me either Lynley or Azhar. You can get me access that no one else has and I swear to God, Barb, if you don’t get off the bleeding fence on this one—”

“I’ll speak to Inspector Lynley directly,” she lied. “That satisfy you? Now, Superintendent Ardery is asking to see me and while I’d love to continue this bloody well
stim
ulating discussion with you, I’ve got to ring off.”

“As long as you know that I’m holding off on this other story for a quarter hour, Barb. That time passes and I hit send and you look for it in tomorrow’s paper.”

“As always, my timbers are shivering,” she said. She banged down the phone and said to Dorothea, “What’s her nibs want with me? Any idea?”

“Detective Inspector Stewart is with her.” She sounded regretful. This wasn’t good.

Barbara thought of fortifying herself with a fag in the stairwell, but she decided that keeping Isabelle Ardery waiting when she had been summoned wasn’t a particularly wise move. So she followed Dorothea to the superintendent’s office, and there she found Ardery in conversation with John Stewart, who’d brought a pile of manila folders with him for some reason that probably wasn’t going to be good.

Barbara joined them. She glanced from Stewart to Ardery to Stewart. She nodded but made no other greeting. Her brain went into high gear, however. She didn’t see how Stewart could have known that she’d been to see Dwayne Doughty in advance of jumping to do his bidding and conducting the interviews he’d assigned to her. And even if he
had
made that discovery, she’d got the bloody interviews done. What more did the sodding bloke want of her?

As it happened, Stewart wanted nothing of her. He’d apparently been summoned into Isabelle Ardery’s office as well, and just like Barbara, he was in the dark about why the superintendent had called him in to a meeting.

Ardery didn’t waste time to bring them both into the picture. She said, “John, I’m reassigning Barbara for a few days. There’s a branch of the investigation in—”

“
What?
” Stewart looked like someone whose balloon had just got popped. He was staring, outraged, at Ardery as if she’d been the person wielding the pin that had popped it.

The superintendent took a moment. She let his tone act like an echo in the room. Then she said carefully, “I’d no idea your hearing was undergoing a change. As I said, I’m reassigning Barbara to another investigation.”

“What
bloody other investigation?” he demanded.

Ardery’s spine underwent a minute adjustment. “I’m not certain you require that knowledge,” she pointed out.

“You put her on my team,” he countered. “And that’s where she stays: on my team.”

“I beg your pardon?” Ardery had been sitting behind her desk with Stewart in front of it, the manila folders still in a neat pile on his lap. She rose now and leaned her height of six feet in his direction, her well-groomed fingertips on a set of reports. “I don’t think you’re in a position to make those kinds of declarations,” she pointed out. “Perhaps you need a moment to sort yourself? I’d take that moment, if I were you.”

“Where’re you putting her?” he demanded. “Every team’s got enough manpower on it. If this is a power play you’ve decided to engage in, it’s not on.”

“You’re out of order.”

“Oh, I’m always
out of order with you. D’you know what I’ve got here? Right here in these folders?” He lifted one and shook it at her. Barbara felt her arms go limp.

“I’m not the least interested in what you’ve got there unless it’s the documentation for an arrest in one of the cases you’ve been handling.”

“Oh, too right,” Stewart said. “You’re not the least interested in
anything
other than—” He stopped himself directly on the brink. He said, “Just forget it. All right. She’s reassigned. Have her. We all know who she’s going to be working with—as he’s the only person who
ever
wants her on his team—and all of us know why you’re only too happy to hand her to him.”

Barbara drew in a sharp breath. She waited to see what the superintendent would do with this one.

Ardery said steadily, “What are you implying, John?”

“I think you know.”

“And I think you’d be wise to reconsider the route you’re taking. As it happens, Barbara will be working directly for me on a matter involving another police officer. And that, John, concludes what you need to know about why I require her. Are we absolutely clear on this or do we need to take our discussion to a higher level?”

Stewart stared at Ardery. She held his gaze. Her face was rigid and his was florid and Barbara knew that they were both enraged. One of them had to take a step away from the other, but she knew it wasn’t going to be the superintendent. Whether it would be Stewart remained to be seen. Misogyny had been driving his behaviour for so many years, it was difficult to know if he could get it under control long enough to get himself out of the superintendent’s office and back to work before she had his head on a platter.

He finally rose. “I take your meaning,” he said. He turned and left the superintendent’s office without a glance in Barbara’s direction. She wondered what he had in those folders of his, though. She reckoned it wasn’t good.

With Stewart gone, the superintendent gestured Barbara to take one of the two chairs in front of her desk. Barbara chose the one Stewart hadn’t been sitting on, all the better not to besmirch her trousers with any of his essence. She waited for clarification, which was quick in coming.

“This situation in Italy has a tentacle reaching to London,” she said. “I had a phone call from DI Lynley early this morning. He needs someone on the case at this end.”

So it
was
Lynley, Barbara thought. Stewart, for all his odious and thinly veiled accusations, had not been very far off the mark. She blessed Lynley for his efforts to get her onto his team. He knew how deep was her concern about Hadiyyah and Azhar, he recognised the nature of her friendship with both of them, and more than anything, he understood how unwelcome it was to her ever to have to work with John Stewart. Bless him, bless him, bless
him, Barbara thought. She owed him, she would repay him, she would be tireless in getting to the bottom of—

“I want to make something clear to you, Barbara,” the superintendent said. “DI Lynley asked for Winston. He’s the obvious choice as, let’s be frank, he has a good track record of obeying orders while that’s not exactly the case for you. But I’d like to give you the opportunity to prove to me directly that you can do the same. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about your time on John Stewart’s team before you and I move along to what the inspector needs you to do for him?”

Here was the moment to fess up, Barbara thought. But she couldn’t risk telling the superintendent that she’d gone her own way more than once in the past few days. Ardery might well pull her off the assignment she’d just put her on. So she said, “It’s not anyone’s secret that John Stewart and I don’t get along, guv. I try. P’rhaps he tries as well. But we’re chalk and cheese.”

Ardery evaluated this, her gaze evenly on Barbara’s. She finally said, “Right,” in a slow and thoughtful drawl. Then she turned and picked up the topmost report on her desk and handed it over.

“The police in Italy have traced the kidnapping of your friend’s little girl back to London.”

“Dwayne Doughty, right?” Barbara said.

Ardery nodded. “They’ve brought in a bloke in Italy who was evidently operating on Doughty’s direction. He appears to have found the child without apparent difficulty but instead of giving the word to her father, Doughty came up with a scheme to kidnap her. What’s been done with her, the Italian doesn’t know. He claims he was given instructions in bits and pieces: It was, he says, a case of ‘Snatch her and I’ll tell you what happens next.’”

“Bloody
pig
,” Barbara said. “I took Azhar to meet this bloke, guv, when Hadiyyah’s mum disappeared with her. He seemed to be on the up-and-up. He worked a bit on looking for her, and he finally told us there was no
bloody trail and I’m-dead-sorry-I-am and that was that.” Barbara didn’t add anything about Azhar: the Berlin alibi,
khushi
, or anything else. Least of all did she add the claims Doughty had made when she’d seen him in the Bow Road nick since the superintendent didn’t know she’d seen him in the Bow Road nick, and she didn’t need to know.

Ardery said, “Yes. Well. He’s involved in some way that DI Lynley needs sorted. I’ve been told that there was never a ransom demanded for the child, so my guess is that someone else beyond Doughty is also involved. Phone the inspector if you have more questions.”

“I will,” Barbara said.

Ardery handed over the report she’d received, and she eyed Barbara before giving her the word to go on her way. She said, “I want to learn at the end that you’ve handled every aspect of this situation in a professional manner, Barbara. Anything less than that, and you and I will be having a different sort of conversation. Am I being clear?”

As mountain spring water, Barbara thought. She said, “Yes, guv, you are. I won’t disappoint you.”

Ardery dismissed her. She didn’t look convinced.

BOW

LONDON

Barbara decided that Doughty was not the place to begin. Presented with the facts as they’d apparently been recited by Michelangelo Di Massimo in the police station in Lucca, he would doubtless be able to produce an airtight rationale for all of them. Barbara could even imagine what it would be: I hired the bloke to find her, and he swore he tried every avenue of exploration to no avail. Are you suggesting that it’s down to
me
that he found her without letting me know? That he planned her kidnapping and handed her over to God only knows who for God only knows what reason and that’s down to me as well? Look, Sergeant, Di Massimo was in a far better position than I to carry this kid off into the hinterlands or wherever the hell he carried her to. I’m supposed to know enough about Italy—where, to be frank, I have never set foot—to have made a kid disappear? And why? For money? Whose money? I don’t know these people. Do any of them even have
money?

And on and on Doughty would go, wearing her down with logic, illogic, and everything in between. So she wouldn’t begin with talking to him. Emily Cass seemed a more likely source of information.

Barbara spent some time digging up whatever might be useful in her conversation with the young woman, who turned out to be no intellectual slouch. She held an advanced degree in economics from the University of Chicago, but since attaining that degree, she’d held a string of jobs that suggested personal unsuitability for the world of business or finance: She’d been a security consultant in Afghanistan, a bodyguard to the children of a minor branch of the Saudi royal family, a personal trainer to a Hollywood actress in need of a task master to keep her body beautiful a body beautiful, and an assistant chef on a yacht whose owner was one of the biggest names in British petroleum. She was, literally, all over the map in her employment history. How she’d ended up in the employ of a private investigator was anyone’s guess.

Her record was clean when it came to the law, though, and she’d sprung from a solidly middle-class family whose paterfamilias was a noted ophthalmologist and whose mother was a paediatrician. With three brothers involved in the medical field as well and another a highly successful Formula One driver, she probably wouldn’t want to have her reputation sullied by any activity she might have engaged in that danced on the wrong side of the law. She was, Barbara assured herself, the better bet when it came to having a tête-à-tête with someone bearing a warrant card.

She had no intention of bearding Em Cass in the den of Dwayne Doughty’s place of business. She didn’t want to ring the woman either. Better not to give her time to inform the private investigator that she was going to be questioned. So she positioned herself in a window of the Roman Café and Kebab a short distance from Bedlovers, whose upper floor housed Dwayne Doughty’s office. There she waited for Emily Cass to appear.