Just One Evil Act (62 page)

“As to laboratories, Azhar . . . You see where they’re heading, don’t you? The Italian coppers? With the whole idea of laboratories?”

He was silent then. The pieces were clicking into place. Or at least that was what Barbara had to believe. He wasn’t speculating in this silence, he wasn’t wondering, and he wasn’t planning his next move. He was merely concluding, completing for himself the chain of events that began with Angelina’s disappearance from London with their daughter in tow and ended with her death in Lucca.

He finally said quietly, “
Streptococcus
, Barbara.”

“What?”

“This is what we study in my laboratory at University College:
Streptococcus
. Some laboratories study more than one bacteria. We do not. We study more than one strain of it, of course. But only strains of
Streptococcus
. Of personal interest to me is the
Strep
that causes meningitis in newborn infants.”

“Azhar. You don’t have to tell me this.”

“The mother, you see,” he said insistently as if she hadn’t spoken, “passes it to the infant as the baby travels through the birth canal. From this develops—”

“I believe you, Azhar.”

“—the infant’s meningitis. We’re seeking a way to prevent this.”

“I understand.”

“And there are other forms as well, other forms of
Strep
that we study in the lab since the graduate students are working on dissertations and the postgraduates are working on papers to be published. But the one I study . . . It is as I said. And of course Angelina was pregnant so they will ask about this, won’t they? How coincidental is it that I would study a bacteria found in pregnant women? And they will wonder as you are wondering because, after all, I arranged the kidnapping of my own child—”

“Azhar,
Azhar
.”

“I did not harm Angelina,” he said. “You cannot think I harmed her.”

She hadn’t been thinking that. She couldn’t even bring herself close to thinking that. But the truth was that in this entire Italian situation, there was more than one kind of harm, and Azhar knew this as well as Barbara herself. She said, “The kidnapping. Those tickets to Pakistan. You have to see how it’s going to look in conjunction with her death if word gets out.”

“Only you and I know about these things, Barbara.” His voice was wary.

“What about Doughty and Smythe?”

“They work for us,” he said. “We do not work for them. They’ve been instructed . . . You must believe me because if you of all people do not believe . . . I did not harm her. Yes, the kidnapping was a terrible thing to arrange, but how else could she ever be made to experience what it feels like when your child is there one day and gone the next and you have no idea . . . ?”

“Pakistan, Azhar. One-way tickets. Lynley knows about them. And he’s doing his homework.”

“You are not thinking,” he cried. “Why would I purchase tickets for July but arrange Angelina’s death in May? Why would I do that when I would have no need of tickets to Pakistan with Angelina dead?”

Because, Barbara thought, those tickets absolve you of suspicion and I did not see that until this moment because I
couldn’t
see it until I learned how Angelina Upman died. She said none of this, but her silence seemed to tell Azhar that something more was required of him, if not now then the next time Inspector Lo Bianco wanted to question him.

He said, “If you think I harmed her, you must ask yourself where I got this bacteria. Of course, someone somewhere in England studies it and perhaps in London but I do not know who. And yes, of course, this is an easy enough thing for me to find out. So I could have found out. But so could anyone else.”

“I see that, Azhar. But you have to ask how likely it is . . .” And here she paused because she had to consider what she owed: not only to Lynley, to Azhar, to Hadiyyah, but also to herself. She said, “The thing is . . . you lied to me once and—”

“I do not lie now! And when I did lie . . . How could I tell you what I had planned? Would you have allowed me to go forward and kidnap her? No, you would not. An officer of the police? How could I have expected this of you? It was something that had to be done on my own.”

As murder is generally done, she thought.

A silence endured between them, broken finally by Azhar. “Is there nothing you are willing to do to help me now?” he asked.

“I haven’t said that.”

“But it’s what you think, isn’t it? ‘I must distance myself from this man because if I do not, it could cost me everything.’”

Which was, Barbara thought wryly, not that far off from what DI Lynley had told her. Everything was on the line for her unless she could think of a way to get herself one step ahead of the Italian police.

THE WEST END

LONDON

Mitchell Corsico was the way, she decided. Once she programmed the phone number of Azhar’s solicitor into her mobile and rubbed it off the stairwell’s wall, she rang the reporter and said, “We need to meet. Angelina Upman’s dead. Why’d you blokes not pick up on the story?”

His fire wasn’t lit. “Who says we didn’t pick up on the story?”

“I sure as hell didn’t see it.”

“Are you saying I’m responsible for what you see or don’t see in the paper?”

“Are you saying it was in the paper but it didn’t make front-page news? You are seriously out of the loop, son. We better meet, pronto.”

He still didn’t bite, the wily bastard. “Tell me why this is front-page news, and
I’ll
tell
you
if we need to meet, Barb.”

She refused to be irritated by the bloke’s arrogance. She said, “
Did
it even make
The Source
, Mitchell? A British girl is kidnapped from a crowd of people, then she’s found stowed in a convent in the Italian Alps under the care of a mental case who thinks she’s a nun, then her mother dies unexpectedly. What part of this isn’t the kind of story that’s meat and potatoes to you lot?”

“Hey, she made page twelve. If she’d done us a favour and offed herself, she’d’ve made page one, but what can I tell you? She didn’t, so she got buried inside.” He guffawed and added, “Pardon the pun.”

“And what if she actually did you blokes a real page-one favour and died in a way that the powers in Italy want hushed up?”

“What, are you saying the Prime Minister killed her? What about the Pope?” Another irritating guffaw from the bloke. “She died in hospital, Barb. We got all the facts. She slipped into a coma and she never came out of it. Her kidneys were done for. So what’re you suggesting: that someone tiptoed into her hospital room and put kidney poison in her drip bag?”

“I’m suggesting you and I need to talk and I’m not prepared to talk till I see your face.”

She allowed him to dwell on this while she herself feverishly considered which of the many ways possible would be best to spin the story in order to hook
The Source
. Politically the rag had become so nationalist over the years, it was practically Nazi in its leaning. She decided flag waving was the way to go. Brits versus the Pasta Eaters. But not yet. Not till she had him hooked.

He finally said, “All right. But this had better be very good, Barb.”

She said, “It is,” and just to be pleasant, she allowed him to name the place of their meeting.

He chose Leicester Square, the half-price ticket booth. The
real
half-price ticket booth, he told her, not some wannabe. There was a fancy notice board next to the real one where tickets on offer for the dramas, comedies, and musicals were announced. He’d meet her there.

She kept her voice airy. “I’ll wear a rose in my lapel.”

“Oh, I expect I’ll know you by the sweat of your desperation,” he said.

They set up a time, and she got there early. Leicester Square was, as usual, a terrorist’s wet dream, with the crowds only getting worse as summer came on. Now there were masses of tourists gathered at open-air restaurants, in front of buskers, buying tickets for the cinema, and attempting to negotiate terms for theatrical productions in need of an audience. By mid-July the masses would have morphed into hordes, and moving through them would be nigh impossible.

She planted herself in front of the notice board and made a show of studying its offerings. Musicals, musicals, musicals, musicals. Plus Hollywood celebrities trying to be stage actors. Shakespeare was spinning in his grave, she reckoned.

She was seven and a half minutes into listening to various debates all round her—what to see, how much to spend, whether
Les Miz
could possibly run for yet another century or maybe two—when the scent of aftershave worked on her like smelling salts. Mitchell Corsico was at her side.

She said, “What the bloody hell are you wearing? Essence of horse? Christ, Mitchell.” She waved a hand in front of her face. “Isn’t the get-up enough for you?” How long, she wondered, could one man possibly keep wearing clothes that suggested a bloke on a quest to find Tonto?

He said, “You wanted this meeting, right? So it needs to be important or I’m not a happy horseman.”

“How does an Italian cover-up sound?”

He glanced round. The jostling of people trying to see the notice board was something of a trial, so he moved towards the edge of the square in the direction of Gerrard Street and its one-hundred-yard claim of being London’s Chinatown. Barbara followed. He planted himself squarely in front of her, then, and said, “What’re you talking about? You better not be playing me.”

“The Italians have the cause of death. They’re not saying officially what it is. They don’t want the papers getting a whiff of it because they don’t want to start a panic. Either among the people or in the economy. Is that enough for you?”

His gaze shifted from her to a balloon seller to her again. “Could be,” he said. “What’s the cause?”

“A strain of
E. coli
. A super strain. A deadly strain. The worst there is.”

His eyes narrowed. “How d’you know this?”

“I know it because I know it, Mitchell. I was there when the call came through from the rozzers.”

“‘Came through’? Where?”

“DI Lynley. He got the word from the chief investigator in Lucca.”

Mitchell’s eyebrows locked. He was, she knew, evaluating her words. He wasn’t a fool. Content was one thing. Meaning was another. The fact that she would bring Lynley into anything at all was raising his warning hairs.

He said, “Why would you be telling me? That’s what I’m wondering.”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Not to me.”

“Bloody hell, Mitchell. You know
E. coli
comes from food, don’t you?
Contaminated
food.”

“So she ate something bad.”

“We’re not talking about a single vinegar crisp, mate. We’re talking about a
supply
of food. Who knows what? Spinach, broccoli, minced beef, tinned tomatoes, lettuce. For all I know it got baked into her lasagna. But the point is, if the word gets out, that whole industry in Italy takes a hit to the solar plexus. A whole section of their economy—”

“You can’t be suggesting there’s a lasagna industry.”

“You know what I mean.”

“So maybe she had a burger somewhere and a worker went to the loo and didn’t wash his hands before stacking on the tomatoes?” He shifted his weight from one cowboy-booted foot to the other and pushed his Stetson farther back on his head. He was garnering one or two curious glances from people who looked to be seeking whatever violin case or other receptacle in which they were supposed to deposit appreciative ten-pence pieces for his costuming, but there weren’t many of those since, in Leicester Square, far more interesting sights existed than the one presented by a London man in a cowboy get-up. “And anyway, the fact that only one person died . . . That pretty much supports the idea, doesn’t it? One person, one burger, one bad tomato.”

“With this bloke, whoever he was, and assuming they even serve burgers in Lucca, Italy—”

“Christ. You know what I mean. The burger’s an example. Say it was a salad. What about that salad with tomatoes and that Italian cheese and whatever that green crap is they put on it? That leafy bit.”

“I look like I would know that, Mitchell? Come on, I’m giving you a significant heads-up on a story that’s going to break in Italy at any moment, only
you
now have the edge because, believe me, the cops and the health blokes over there aren’t about to release it and cause a stampede away from Italian products.”

“So you say.” But he wasn’t a fool. “Why’re you into this anyway, Barb? This got to do with . . . ? Where’s our Love Rat Dad these days?”

There was no way she wanted him anywhere near Azhar. She said, “Haven’t spoken to him. He went to Lucca for the funeral. I expect he’s back now. Or still there with the kid, getting her packed. Who the bloody hell knows? Listen, you can do what you want with this story, mate. I think it’s gold. You think it’s lead? Fine, don’t run it. There’re other papers who’d be happy to—”

“I didn’t say that, did I? I just don’t want this to be another bomb like the other.”

“What d’you mean, ‘bomb’?”

“Well, let’s face it, Barb, the kid was found.”

Barbara stared at the man. She wanted so badly to punch his Adam’s apple that her fingernails clawed at the skin of her palms. She said slowly as her blood pounded so hard in her head that she thought she would soon see stars, “Too right, Mitch. That was a blow for your lot. So much better to have had a corpse. Mutilated, too. That would move those copies right off the newsstand.”

“I’m only saying . . . Look, this is an ugly business. You know that. Fact is, you and I wouldn’t be talking in the first place if you thought it was anything else.”

“If we’re talking ugly, Italian cops and Italian politicos in bed with each other is bloody ugly. That’s your story, at the cost of an Englishwoman’s life with more lives in jeopardy. You can take it or leave it to another rag. Decision is yours.”

She turned and began to stride towards Charing Cross Road. She would walk the distance back to New Scotland Yard. She needed the time to cool off, she reckoned.

WAPPING