Just One Evil Act (64 page)

VICTORIA

LONDON

The fact that the wife of one Daniele Bruno was a flight attendant on the regular route between Pisa and London turned out to be a nonstarter, as Lynley had thought it might when he checked into it for Salvatore Lo Bianco. She flew into and out of Gatwick several times a day, but that was an end to it. She never had cause to spend the night. She would do, on the off chance that an extreme flight delay resulted in aircraft being held overnight. But when that occurred—which it had not done in the past twelve months—she stayed with the rest of the flight crew at an airport hotel and left the next morning.

Lynley reported all this to Salvatore, who agreed that the matter of Daniele Bruno was turning into an unmistakable dead end. He’d seen all the photos of the funeral, he said. Bruno was there,
certo
, but so was everyone else. “I think he has nothing to do with nothing,” Salvatore said in English.

Lynley didn’t point out that the double negative resulted in Daniele Bruno being guilty of
something
, if only of being part of a fantasy from the fractured mind of a drug addict. For they had only the word of Carlo Casparia that Bruno had met Lorenzo Mura alone at the football practice field in the first place. And this word had come after being held without a solicitor’s involvement, after days of interrupted sleep and very little food. Daniele Bruno was a nonstarter, he reckoned, just like his wife.

But there had to be someone, somewhere, with access to something . . .

They both knew who that someone probably was.

St. James’s arrival at New Scotland Yard added little to the mix they had. Lynley met his friend in Reception, and they spoke to each other over morning coffee on the fourth floor.

It had been easy enough for St. James to visit Azhar’s lab. By virtue of his university background and his reputation as a forensic scientist and expert witness, he had colleagues everywhere. A few phone calls had made a walkthrough of the lab a simple thing to arrange. The excuse was meeting the distinguished professor of microbiology Taymullah Azhar. Since he wasn’t there, the offer made by one of Azhar’s two research technicians to show St. James round the lab was accepted with gratitude. They were fellow scientists after all, were they not?

The lab was extensive and impressive, St. James told Lynley, but for all intents and purposes the subject of study was indeed various strains of
Streptococcus
. The focus had to do with mutations of these strains, and the equipment in the lab supported this work.

“From what I could see, it appears to be a fairly straightforward operation,” St. James said.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what’s there is what one would expect in a lab of its type: fume cupboards, centrifuge, autoclave, refrigerators for storing DNA, sequencers for the DNA data, freezers for bacterial isolates, incubators for bacterial cultures, computers . . . There appear to be two main areas of study going on: the
Streptococcus
that causes necrotising fasciitis—”

“Which is?”

St. James added a packet of sugar to his coffee and stirred it. “Flesh-eating bacteria syndrome,” he said.

“Good God.”

“The other is the S
treptococcus
that causes pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis. They’re both serious strains, obviously, but the second one—it’s called
Streptococcus agalactiae
—crosses the blood-brain barrier and can be deadly.”

Lynley thought about this. He said, “Is there a chance someone in the lab could be studying
E. coli
on the sly?”

“I suppose anything’s possible, Tommy, but to know for certain you’d need a mole inside the place. Some of the equipment could be used for
E. coli
cultures, obviously. But the broths for growing each of them would be different, as would the incubators.
Strep
requires a carbon dioxide incubator.
E. coli
doesn’t.”

“Could there be more than one kind in the lab?”

“More than one kind of incubator? Certainly. At least a dozen people work in the place. One of them may have something brewing that deals with
E. coli.
”

“Without Azhar’s knowledge?”

“I doubt it would be without his knowledge unless someone has a nefarious reason for studying it.”

They exchanged a long look. St. James finally said, “Ah. It’s a tricky thing, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed.”

“He’s a friend of Barbara’s, isn’t he? Certainly, she could have some insight here, Tommy. Perhaps if she were to go to the lab herself and do a bit of delving on a pretext having to do with Azhar . . . ?”

“That’s not on, I’m afraid.”

“Can you get a search warrant, then?”

“If it comes to it, yes.”

St. James examined Lynley’s expression for a moment before he said, “But you hope it doesn’t come to that, I take it?”

“I’m not at all sure what I hope any longer” was Lynley’s reply.

VICTORIA

LONDON

He would have liked to talk to Barbara about what he’d learned from St. James. She’d been for years his go-to person when he wanted to toss round ideas in the course of an investigation. But it was unlikely that she would say anything, do anything, or admit to anything that might endanger Taymullah Azhar. So he was left to do his thinking alone.

It had been an excellent means of eliminating Angelina Upman. Once the small matter of no one else’s having been affected by the bacteria had been dealt with in one way or another, the road was clear to declaring her death an unfortunate result of food contamination by a virulent strain of bacteria that generally—if detected soon enough—killed no one. Complications from her pregnancy had prevented the doctors from realising what they were dealing with. As did Angelina’s own reluctance to stay in hospital once she finally took herself there. As did the fact that no one else who shared meals with her and no one else in Tuscany, for that matter, turned up in hospital with the same symptoms.

Someone must have seen how everything was going to play out, Lynley thought. That suggested Lorenzo Mura, but as to
why
he would wish to harm the woman who was carrying his child, the woman he loved and fully intended to marry . . . Unless, of course, all of his devotion was a front for something else.

He thought back over every encounter he’d had with the man. He could see the many ways in which Lorenzo had had the opportunity to mix the bacteria into Angelina’s food—the man was, after all, solicitous of her condition because of the pregnancy—but he couldn’t come up with how he’d got the stuff in the first place . . . until he remembered the man he’d seen at the
fattoria
when he’d first called there.

What had Lynley seen? A thick envelope handed from this unnamed man to Lorenzo Mura. What had Lorenzo declared? It was payment for one of the donkey foals he raised on the premises.

But what if that man had brought something other than money? Any possibility was one worth pursuing. Lynley picked up the phone and rang Salvatore Lo Bianco.

He had much to tell him anyway: He began with St. James’s visit to Taymullah Azhar’s lab, and he ended with the mystery man handing over an envelope to Lorenzo Mura at Fattoria di Santa Zita
.

“Mura claimed it was cash for one of his foals. I thought nothing of it at the time, but if there’s actually no
E. coli
in Taymullah Azhar’s laboratory in London—”

“There is no
E. coli
now,” Salvatore replied. “But he would, of course, have no need of it now, would he,
Ispettore
?”

“I see that. He’d have had to be rid of whatever was left—if indeed there was any left—when he returned to London, having already managed to get Angelina to ingest whatever he’d taken to Italy. But here’s something else to consider, Salvatore. What if Angelina was not the intended victim?”

“Who, then?” Salvatore asked.

“Perhaps Azhar?”

“How was he to ingest this
E. coli
?”

“If Mura gave him something . . . ?”

“That he gave no one else? How would that have looked, my friend? ‘Eat this
panino
, signore, because you look hungry’? Or ‘Try this especial
salsa di pomodoro
on your pasta’? And how did he put his hands on
E. coli
? And
if
he put his hands on it, how would he poison the professor but have no one else affected?”

“I think we must find the man with the donkeys,” Lynley said.

“Who does what? Brew
E. coli
in his bathtub? Notice it crawling round the droppings of a cow or two? My friend, you try to bend what you’ve seen to fit what you hope. You forget Berlin.”

“What about it?”

“The conference that our microbiologist attended there. What was to prevent someone passing along to him a bit of this bacteria at the conference?”

“That was in April. She died weeks later.”

“
Sì
, but he has a lab, does he not? He keeps it there . . . however it is kept: warm, cold, boiling, freezing. I do not know. He labels it as something, I do not know what. But as you say, he is the head of this lab so no one is likely to bother anything labelled with the professor’s own writing. When it comes time to use it, he takes it with him to Italy.”

“But this presupposes he knew everything from the first: that Hadiyyah would be kidnapped, that Angelina would come in search of her, that he himself would go to Italy . . . If he’d been wrong about anything—especially about any move made by any of the principals—the plan would have crumbled.”

“As it has done,
no
?”

Lynley had to admit there was truth in this. He asked Salvatore what was next, although he had a feeling he already knew.

“I will pay a call upon the good professor. And in the meantime, I will have officers look into the work of all the people who attended that April conference in Berlin.”

LUCCA

ITALY

Salvatore decided not to have Taymullah Azhar come to the
questura
. He knew how quickly word would filter back to Piero Fanucci that he had done this. And while a conversation with the London professor had not been forbidden to him, he wanted any reports of what he did to go nowhere until he had more information. Once he’d directed Ottavia and Giorgio to look into the attendees at the Berlin conference, he set off for the
anfiteatro
. On his way, he phoned the London professor and told him in his very bad English to phone his
avvocato.

They were waiting for him in the breakfast room of the
pensione
when Salvatore arrived. He asked where the child was. Had she gone back to Scuola Dante Alighieri?

She had not, he was told. After all, Azhar was anticipating a quick end to whatever matter had caused Salvatore to request his passport. Once clarity had been reached in this matter, they would depart as soon as they could. Sending her to school . . . ? This did not seem a reasonable idea since they would be leaving Italy so shortly.

Salvatore suggested two things at that point. The first was that adequate care for Hadiyyah needed to be arranged. The second was that he look closely at what Salvatore was about to show him.

He passed to the professor and his
avvocato
the copy of the card from Villa Rivelli
.
He watched closely as Azhar’s gaze fell upon it. There was nothing on his face. He turned the paper over to see if anything was written on the back of it, which Salvatore well recognised as a stalling tactic that gave him time to develop an explanation.

He said, “And so,
Dottore
?” to Azhar and waited for Aldo Greco’s translation of what the London man would say. Aldo shifted his buttocks, grimaced, passed gas, pardoned himself, and took up the document for an examination. He read it and handed it back to Azhar. Before Azhar could speak, Greco asked what this thing was and how Salvatore had come by it.

Salvatore had no problem with revealing either bit of information. It was a copy of a greeting card, he said. It had been found at the location where Hadiyyah Upman had been held after her abduction.

The card itself or the copy? Greco asked shrewdly.

The card, of course, Salvatore told him, which was still in the hands of the
carabinieri
who’d been called to Villa Rivelli by the Mother Superior. In due time the original would be sent to be included with any other gathered evidence.

“Do you recognise this,
Dottore
? It appears to be in your handwriting.”

Aldo Greco intervened at once. He said, “A handwriting expert has confirmed that,
Ispettore
? Surely you yourself are no expert in such a matter.”

Salvatore said that,
certo
, an expert would be employed by the police if things came to that. He himself was there merely to ascertain the provenance of this greeting card.

“
Con permesso?
” Salvatore concluded. He indicated with a nod at Azhar that he would be delighted to hear the London man’s reply should his
avvocato
deem such a thing a reasonable request.

Signor Greco said to Azhar, “Go ahead,
Professore
.”

Azhar said that he did not recognise the card or the message upon it. As to the handwriting . . . It looked similar to his own, he said, but handwriting could be copied by someone with the expertise to do so.

“You know, of course, that there are ways to discern a forgery from a real document,” Salvatore told him. “There are experts in forgery—forensic experts—who spend all day doing such work. They look for special signs, marks of hesitation that the true writer of something would not make in the course of penning a note. You know this
, sì
?”

“The professor is not an idiot,” Greco commented. “He has answered your question, Salvatore.”

Salvatore pointed out the word
khushi
. “And this?” he said to Azhar.

Azhar confirmed that it was his pet name for his daughter, something he had called her from the moment of her birth. It meant
happiness
, he explained.

“And this name
khushi
 . . . you alone called her that?” And when Azhar confirmed that this was the case, “Just between the two of you?”