Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

piss.”
    “Maybe you were going to grab this pretty one by the arm and march her over to—”
    “In your dreams, man.”
    Fanucci pounded the table in front of the young man. “You’ll sit here till you tell me the truth,” he roared.
    Salvatore used this moment to slip out of the room. He could see that Fanucci would be entertained for hours. He found himself oddly grateful to poor Carlo. He himself could now get something done while Fanucci concentrated on getting “the truth” out of him.
    The reality was that they’d had more than one call after the television appeal. They’d had dozens of calls and dozens of putative sightings of little Hadiyyah. Now that Fanucci was absorbed with his questioning of Carlo Casparia, the police could, in peace, sort through the information that was coming in. Something within it might be worth pursuing.
    LUCCA
    TUSCANY
    Something indeed turned up one hour into Fanucci’s interrogation of the drug addict. An officer tracked down Salvatore as he was waiting for a stained Moka to finish brewing its viscous
caffè
over the gas flame in the coffee room. There’d been a sighting of a flashy red car in the hills above Pomezzana, he reported to Salvatore. This sighting had been memorable to the caller for several reasons.
    “
Perché?
” Salvatore listened to the Moka’s final burbling. He reached for a marginally clean cup on the shelf above the sink, gave it a quick rinse and quick wipe, and poured the coffee.
Perfetto
, he thought. Bitter and coal-coloured. Just the way he liked it.
    First, he was told, the convertible top on the car was down. The caller—this was a man who identified himself as Mario Germano, on his way to see his mamma in the village of Fornovolasco—saw the vehicle parked beneath some chestnut trees in a lay-by, and his first thought was that it was foolish to leave a car like that parked with its top down where anyone could come along and play mischief with it. So he’d given the car a second look as he drove by, and that brought them to the second reason Signor Germano remembered the car.
    “
Sì?
” Salvatore sipped the coffee. He leaned against the counter and waited for more. It was soon in coming, and it made the coffee turn to bile in his mouth.
    A man was leading a child away from the car and into the woods, the officer said. Signor Germano saw them and assumed that it was a father leading his child to relieve herself out of sight of the road.
    “Why did he assume it was a father and child? Is he sure the child was female?” Salvatore asked.
    Truth be told, Signor Germano wasn’t completely sure about the sex of the child, but he thinks it was a little girl. And he assumed it was a father and child because . . . well, what else would it have been? Why would anyone assume anything else but an innocent drive in the hills on a sunny afternoon, interrupted momentarily by a child’s need to squat in the bushes out of sight?
    “This Signor Germano,” Salvatore asked, “is he certain about the sighting?”
    He was indeed because he visited his mamma on a regular schedule.
    “And he takes the same route every time?”
    Sì, sì, sì.
The route is in the Apuan Alps, and it’s the only road to get to his mamma’s village.
    It was too much to hope for that Signor Germano would remember in which lay-by the red car had been parked, and he did not remember. But since he’d been on his way to his mamma’s village, the lay-by was, naturally, somewhere along the mountain road in advance of that place.
    Salvatore nodded. This was progress indeed. It could be nothing at all, but he had a feeling this was not so. He dispatched two officers to fetch Signor Germano and to drive him into the Apuan Alps on the route to his mamma’s village. If his memory was jogged as to the correct lay-by, excellent. If his memory failed him, then every lay-by would have to be checked. For the point was not the lay-by itself but the shrubbery beyond it, as well as the woods and any trail leading into the woods. Salvatore didn’t want to think that the child might have been disposed of in the Alps, but every day that passed without word about a ransom and without finding her alive made that possibility ever more likely.
    His order to the officers was to hold close this information about the red car in the Alps. The only people to be told would be the parents, he said. And they would be told only that a possible sighting was being looked into as there was no need