Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

trousers and his black leather jacket with his yellow hair and his very black eyebrows—”
    “
Basta
,” Di Massimo snapped. “I was asked to locate them, the girl and her mother. That is all. I search Pisa first: the hotels, the
pensioni
, even the convents that rent out rooms. Then I broaden the search.”
    “Why Lucca?” Lynley asked the man.
    His eyes became hooded as he considered the question and, apparently, what it would reveal if he answered it.
    “Why Lucca?” Salvatore repeated. “And who hired you, Michelangelo?”
    “There was a bank transaction that I was told about. It came from Lucca, so I went to Lucca. You know how it works, Chief Inspector. One thing leads to another and the investigator follows trails. That’s it.”
    “A bank transaction?” Salvatore said. “Who told you about a bank transaction? What kind of bank transaction, Miko?”
    “A transfer of money. That’s all I knew. The money started in Lucca. It ended in London.”
    “And who hired you?” Lynley asked the man. “When were you hired?”
    “In January,” Michelangelo said.
    “By whom?”
    “He’s called Dwayne Doughty. He hired me to find the girl. And that, Chief Inspector, is all I know. I did a job for him. I looked for a child who was supposed to be in the company of her mother. I had a photo of them, so I did what anyone searching would do: I went to the hotels and the
pensioni
. If that’s a crime, arrest me now. If it isn’t, let me go back to reading my book in peace.”
    LUCCA
    TUSCANY
    Lynley rang Barbara Havers as he and Lo Bianco made the trip back to Lucca. He reached her deep into attempting to transcribe an action report for an officer whose cursive she was finding illegible. She sounded irritated and in need of nicotine. For the first time Lynley wouldn’t have minded her lighting up. He knew she would need to once he imparted the information he now had about Dwayne Doughty.
    There was a moment of silence when he told her: The London private investigator had hired a Pisa private investigator to track down Angelina Upman and her daughter in Lucca. This investigator had begun his work for Doughty in January, four months earlier. To her “Bloody hell, he lied to me!” Lynley added that a bank account was involved, as was a transfer of money from Lucca to London. “Doughty has apparently known a great deal more than he’s been telling you, Barbara,” Lynley said.
    “He’s working for me,” she fumed. “He’s bloody goddamn working for me!”
    “You’ll need to have a word.”
    “Oh, I bloody know that,” she barked. “When I get my hands on the sodding worm—”
    “Just don’t do it now. Don’t leave the office. And if I might suggest . . . ?”
    “What? Because if you think I’m handing this little matter over to someone else, you’re bleeding from your ears.”
    “I wasn’t heading there,” he told her. “But you might want to take Winston with you if you’re going to confront this bloke.”
    “I don’t need protection, Inspector.”
    “Believe me, I know. But the cachet of authority that Winston will lend to an interview . . . ? Not to mention the implied threat of his presence . . . ? You do need that. These aren’t the most cooperative of blokes, Barbara. Doughty might need convincing in the matter of talking if he’s been hiding details from you.”
    She agreed to this, and they rang off. Lynley told Lo Bianco who Doughty was and how he had fitted into the search for Hadiyyah from the previous November. Lo Bianco whistled and shot him a look. “For an Englishman to have taken the child,” he said, “this would have been an easier matter.”
    “Only as to language,” Lynley pointed out. “Because if the Englishman doesn’t live in Lucca or somewhere nearby . . . Where would he have taken her?”
    At the
questura
, they quickly learned that there was an additional development. As it happened, a tourist using a local apartment in Piazza San Alessandro as a base for her trip to Tuscany had been in the
mercato
on the day of Hadiyyah’s disappearance. She was an American woman travelling with her daughter, both of them students of the Italian language, neither of them fluent, but both in town to practise as much as they could. So they read the tabloids as well as the newspapers, they watched the television and tried to understand what was being said, and they talked to the
cittadini
of the town. They’d seen the appeal on the news, and they’d looked