Just One Evil Act (61 page)

“That’s where she was the morning she claimed whatever she claimed—Was it a stop for petrol? Traffic? God, I can’t even remember now—about why she was late to our meeting.”

“John Stewart again, then? Christ, Isabelle, how much longer are you going to put up with his machinations? Or did you order him, at this point, to start tailing Barbara?”

“Don’t let’s make this about something other than what it is. And what it is is beginning to look like a cover-up, which as you bloody well know is far more serious than creating a story about her miserable mother falling over a stool or
whatever
the hell it was supposed to be in her care home.”

“I’m the first to admit she was out of order doing that.”

“Oh, let me call on the saints and angels in praise,” Isabelle said. “And now what we have is a set of behaviours on the part of Sergeant Havers that strongly suggest she’s stitching up evidence.”

“We have no UK crime,” he reminded her.

“Don’t take me for a fool. She’s over the side, Tommy. You and I both know it. I may have started out investigating arson in my career, but one thing I learned from examining fire scenes is that if my nose is picking up the scent of smoke, there’s bloody well been a fire.”

He waited for her to tell him the rest, which constituted those airline tickets to Pakistan. Still she did not. He concluded once again that, for whatever little good it did Havers, Isabelle continued not to know about the tickets. Had she known, she would have told him at this point. There was no reason to hold back that information.

She said to him, “Did you know she’d been to see Smythe and Doughty in the company of Azhar?”

He looked at her steadily as he formulated his reply: which way to go and what it would mean if he went there. He had hoped she wouldn’t ask the question, but as she said, she wasn’t a fool.

“Yes,” he told her.

She looked heavenward, crossing her arms beneath her breasts. “You’re protecting her by stitching up evidence yourself, I take it?”

“I am not,” he said.

“So what am I to think . . . ?”

“That I don’t know everything yet, Isabelle. And until I know it, I saw no reason to worry you.”

“You mean to protect her, don’t you? No matter the cost. God in heaven, what’s wrong with you, Tommy? This is your bloody career we’re talking about.” And when he didn’t answer, she said, “Never mind. It
isn’t
, is it? What was I thinking? The earldom awaits. Is that what they call it, by the way, an earldom? And the family pile in Cornwall is always there ready for you to decamp to if you want to throw all of this over. You don’t need to do this kind of work. It’s all a lark for you. It’s a walk in the park. It’s a bloody joke. It’s—”

“Isabelle,
Isabelle
.” He took a step towards her.

She held up her hand. “Don’t.”

“Then what?” he asked her.

“Can you not for one moment
see
where this is heading, for all of us? Can you not look beyond Barbara Havers for a bloody instant and realise the position she’s putting us in? Not only herself, but us as well.”

He had to see it because, like her, he was not a fool. But he also had to admit to himself that before this moment he hadn’t thought about the impact Barbara’s behaviour would have upon Isabelle herself should all of what she had done come out into the open. Hearing Isabelle’s voice tinged as it was with despair, he felt as if the clouds were parting and where the sun was shining was not, at this moment, upon Barbara. For Isabelle Ardery was in charge of all the officers, and the responsibility for what the members of her squad did and did not do ultimately rested upon her shoulders.

Cleaning house
was what it was generally called in the aftermath of corruption’s coming to light. The rubbish got tossed to appease the public, and Isabelle Ardery stood in very good stead to be part of that rubbish.

He said to her, “This situation . . . It’s not going to come to that, Isabelle.”

“Oh, you know that, do you?”

“Look at me,” he said. And when she finally did so and when he read the fear in her eyes, he said, “I do. I won’t allow you to be damaged. I swear it.”

“You don’t have that power. No one does.”

Now as Lynley guided the Healey Elliott into Cheyne Walk, he tried to put his promise to Isabelle from his mind. There were bigger issues even than Barbara’s involvement with Taymullah Azhar, Dwayne Doughty, and Bryan Smythe, and those needed to be dealt with as soon as possible. Still, his heart was heavy as he parked the car near the top of Lawrence Street. He walked the distance back to Lordship Place and went in through the gate that led to a garden he knew as well as he knew his own.

They were in the last stages of an alfresco lunch beneath a cherry tree in magnificent bloom in the centre of the lawn: his oldest friend, that friend’s wife, and her father. They were watching an enormous grey cat slinking along an herbaceous border thick with lunaria, bellis, and campanula. They were apparently hot into a discussion on the subject of Alaska—said cat—and whether his best mousing days were over.

When they heard the squeak of the garden gate, they turned. Simon St. James said, “Ah, Tommy. Hullo.”

Deborah said, “You’re just in time to settle an argument. How are you on the subject of cats?”

“Nine lives or otherwise?”

“Otherwise.”

“Not an expert, I’m afraid.”

“Damn.”

Deborah’s father, Joseph Cotter, rose to his feet and said, “Afternoon, m’lord. A coffee?”

Lynley waved Cotter back to his seat. He fetched another chair from the terrace at the top of the steps that led to the house’s basement kitchen. He joined them at the table and took a look at the remains of their meal. Salad, a dish with green beans and almonds, lamb bones littering their plates, the tail end of a loaf of crusty bread, a bottle of red wine. Cotter had been cooking, obviously. Deborah’s talents were artistic, but her artistry was decidedly minimal in the kitchen. As for St. James . . . If he managed marmite on toast, it was cause for massive celebration.

“How old is Alaska?” he enquired, preparatory to giving his opinion.

“Lord, I don’t know,” Deborah said. “I think we got him . . . Was I ten years old, Simon?”

“He can’t possibly be seventeen,” Lynley said. “How many lives can he have?”

“I think he’s been through eight of them at least,” St. James told him. He said to his wife, “Perhaps fifteen.”

“Me or the cat?”

“The cat, my love.”

“Then I proclaim his mousing days . . . still ongoing,” Lynley said. He made a hasty benediction over the animal, who was at that moment attacking a fallen leaf with an enthusiasm that suggested he thought it was dinner.

“There you have it,” Deborah said to her husband. “Tommy knows best.”

“Having vast experience with felines?” St. James asked.

“Having vast experience of knowing with whom I ought to agree when paying a social call,” Lynley said. “I had a feeling that Deborah was on the side of mousing. She’s always been an advocate for your animals. Where’s the dog?”

“Being punished, if one can actually punish a dachshund,” Deborah told him. “She was being far too insistent about having her share of lamb, and she’s been put back into the kitchen.”

“Poor Peach.”

“You only say that because you weren’t present to witness her machinations,” St. James told him.

“We call it ‘love eyes,’” Deborah added. “She casts them upon one and it’s impossible to deny her.”

Lynley chuckled. He leaned back in his chair and took a final moment to enjoy their company, the day, the simple pleasure of gathering in the garden for lunch. Then he said, “It’s business I’ve come on, actually,” and as Joseph Cotter then rose as if to make himself scarce, Lynley told him to stay if he wished as there was no secret involved in his mission in Chelsea.

But Cotter said it was time for him to do the washing up. He took a tray from its resting place on the lawn and loaded it efficiently. Deborah helped him, and in a moment she and her father left the two men alone.

“What sort of business?” St. James asked him.

“Scientific, actually.” Lynley brought him into the picture regarding the death of Angelina Upman in Italy. He related the details from the phone call Salvatore Lo Bianco had made to him. St. James listened in his usual fashion, his angular face reflective.

At Lynley’s conclusion, he was silent for a moment before he said, “Could there have been a laboratory error? Having an isolated case of so virulent a strain of bacteria . . . To me, it doesn’t suggest murder as much as it suggests human error in examining what came from the dead woman’s gut. The point at which bacterial involvement is suspected . . . ? That should have happened while she was alive. It’s going to be difficult for Lo Bianco to prove anything, isn’t it? For example, how the
E. coli
entered her system at all.”

“I suppose that’s why he wants to begin with the lab. Will you do it for me?”

“Pay a call at University College? Of course.”

“Azhar claims his lab’s studying
Streptococcus
. Lo Bianco’s looking for anything else they might be studying. As for transport . . .” Lynley shifted in his chair. Movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Alaska had dived into the herbaceous border and a furious battle appeared to be going on among a patch of violas. He said, “
Could
he have transported a bacteria safely from London to Lucca, Simon?”

St. James nodded. “It merely needs to be put on a medium that allows it to survive, a broth and a solidifier. Onto the solid, one would streak the bacteria. Placed onto a petri dish, it not only would survive but grow.”

“How much would be needed to kill someone?”

“That depends, doesn’t it?” St. James said. “Toxicity is the key.”

“I have the impression from Salvatore that the
E. coli
we’re seeking is particularly toxic.”

“I’ll have to be careful, then,” Simon said. He folded his linen table napkin and pushed himself to his feet. He was disabled, so rising was always a rather awkward business for St. James, but Lynley knew better than to offer his assistance.

VICTORIA

LONDON

When Barbara saw who was ringing her mobile, she ducked into the stairwell to take the call. There were voices echoing up the stairs from somewhere far below, but they disappeared as whoever was climbing left the stairwell for one of the lower floors. She said to Azhar, “How are you? Where are you? What’s happening over there?” and although she tried to keep from her voice the desperate urgency that she was feeling, she could tell from his hesitation prior to responding that he heard it and wondered about it.

“I have a solicitor,” he told her. “He is called Aldo Greco. I wanted to give you his phone number, Barbara.”

She had a pencil but no paper, and she searched the floor frantically for something to write on before she had to give in and use the faded yellow wall. She took the number down for later programming into her mobile. She said, “Good. That’s an important step.”

“He speaks English very well,” Azhar said. “I’m told that it is lucky indeed that I found myself in need of a solicitor while being detained in this part of Italy. I’m told had this . . . this situation occurred in one of the small towns deeply south of Naples, it would be more difficult as a solicitor would have had to be willing to come from a larger city. I do not know why this is the case. It is merely what they told me.”

Barbara knew he was only making conversation. Her heart cracked a little at the thought that he would have to do this with her, his friend. She said, “What’s the embassy going to do? Have you spoken to anyone there?”

He said that he had, that it was the embassy who had given him a list of solicitors in Tuscany. But aside from that list, they could do little else for him beyond phoning his relatives, which he hardly wanted them to do. “They say that when a British national gets into difficulties on foreign soil, it’s up to that British national to get himself out of those difficulties.”

“Nice of them, informing you of that,” Barbara noted sardonically. “I always did wonder what our bloody taxes are going for.”

“Of course they have other concerns,” he said. “And as they do not know me and only have my word that there is no reason for the police to wish to question me . . . I suppose I can understand.”

Barbara found she could see him even without his presence. He’d be wearing one of the crisp white shirts he usually wore, she reckoned, along with trousers that were dark and simple. Cut well to fit him, the clothing would inadvertently reveal his slender frame. He’d always looked so delicate, she thought, so insubstantial when compared to other men. His appearance along with how well she knew him—and she knew him well, she told herself—spoke of his essential goodness. Which was, at the end of the day, why she gave him the information he needed in order to prepare himself for what was coming. This wasn’t about her loyalty to anyone, she told herself. This was about basic fairness.

She said, “Her kidney failure was caused by a toxin, Azhar. Shiga toxin it’s called.”

There was silence for a moment. Then he said, “What?” as if he hadn’t heard her clearly or, hearing her, couldn’t quite believe what she was telling him.

“DI Lynley rang the Italian bloke for me. He got the information.”

“From Chief Inspector Lo Bianco?”

“That’s the name. This bloke Lo Bianco said that Shiga toxin caused her kidneys to fail.”

“How is this possible? The strain of
E. coli
that results in Shiga toxin—”

“She picked it up somewhere, the
E. coli
. Apparently a bloody nasty strain of it. The doctors didn’t know what they were dealing with because of her earlier problems with the pregnancy, so they did a few basic tests and when the tests were negative or whatever they gave her a course of antibiotics—”

“Oh my God,” he murmured.

Barbara said nothing, and after a moment, he seemed to begin thinking aloud because he went on in a meditative tone with, “This is why he asked me about . . .” And then his voice altered to insistence as he said, “It has to be a mistake, Barbara. For one person alone to die from this? No. Virtually impossible. This is a bacteria,
E. coli
. It infects a food supply. Someone else would fall ill. Many people would fall ill because they would eat from the same food supply as Angelina. Do you see what I mean? This cannot have happened. There has to be a laboratory error.”