Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

where was she now? What had happened to her? For the truth was that the area in which they stood was vast, and if Squali had handed the child off to another or had killed and disposed of her somewhere to fulfill a sick fantasy, the location in which either of these things had occurred was going to prove almost impossible to find.
    Salvatore considered cadaver dogs. Pray God, he thought, they would not have to use them.
    VILLA RIVELLI
    TUSCANY
    Sister Domenica Giustina was light-headed from the fasting. She was sore from kneeling on the hard stone floor. She was thick in the brain from going without sleep, and she was still waiting for God to send her a sign about what it was He wished her to do next.
    She’d failed with Carina. The child simply had not understood the crucial importance of what had lain before them both. Something within her had stirred her to fear and trepidation. And now, instead of joyful acceptance, curious playfulness, and eager cooperation with every aspect of life at the Villa Rivelli, the child kept her distance from Sister Domenica Giustina. She watched and she waited. Sometimes, she hid. This was not good.
    Sister Domenica Giustina had begun to think that she had, perhaps, misinterpreted what she’d seen as she’d watched her cousin’s car come roaring up the narrow mountain road. She’d known God’s hand was behind the car’s ripping through the crash barrier, flying into space, and disappearing. What she did not know and had to clarify was what it meant that God had placed her at that precise moment in a position to see what end had been met by her cousin Roberto. The sight of his car shooting into the void had seemed an illustration of the importance of being shriven of sins, but perhaps it meant something else entirely.
    For this reason had she fasted and prayed. As a form of scourging, she tightened the swaddling that was a torment to her flesh. At the end of forty-eight hours like this, she rose with some difficulty but without the peace of knowing what she was meant to do. God’s answer hadn’t come from her suffering and her supplication. Perhaps, she thought, it would come from careful attention to a soft breeze that she could hear blowing through the trees of the forest that edged the immediate grounds of the villa. Perhaps God’s voice would be on that breeze.
    She went outside. She felt the restorative light wind on her cheeks. She paused at the top of the stone steps that led to her rooms above the barn, and she gazed upon the shuttered villa and wondered if the answers she sought might be contained within its walls. For she needed answers soon at this point. Roberto’s terrible passage from the mountain road into the vacancy of space told her that.
    She descended the stone steps. She began to consider an important way in which she might have misunderstood. She’d been dwelling upon Roberto’s demise when, perhaps, he had not met his end at all. If that was the case, then seeking God’s message in the death of her cousin would be a completely useless activity. She should, in other words, have been seeking God’s message in something else.
    There would be a sign of this. There had always been signs, and if she was correct in this new understanding, something was going to tell her soon. It seemed to her that the only place a sign might come to her was the same spot where she’d seen the last sign. So she went to where the low wall allowed her a view of the road that twisted up from the valley floor, and in very short order, she was given precisely what she had been praying for.
    Even at this distance from the place where Roberto’s car had crashed through the barrier, she could see the police cars. More important, she could see that among them
un’ambulanza
stood. As she watched, so far from them, she made out the workers carrying a stretcher up from some point below the twist of road. When they had lifted it onto the tarmac, they paused, and someone waiting for them bent over the stretcher as if to have a word with whoever rode upon it. This did not take long, after which the stretcher was loaded into the ambulance and it drove away.
    Sister Domenica Giustina watched all this, her heart feeling as if it would catch in her chest. It was hard to believe what she was witnessing, but there could be no doubt in interpreting what she’d seen. Even as she had prayed and fasted within her cell, seeking to understand God’s intention for her, her cousin Roberto had