Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

not listen to me,” Lorenzo said to them.
    “You don’t listen to
me
. I have no symptoms. It was flu or a bad meal or a twenty-four-hour whatever. I’m fine now. I’m going home. You’re the one being ridiculous about this.”
    Lorenzo’s face darkened but that was the extent of his reaction. “
Le donne incinte
,” Lynley murmured to him. Pregnant women needed to be humoured. Things would return to normal again—at least in this matter—when Angelina was safely delivered of their child. As to the rest of their life together . . . He knew this depended on the outcome of Hadiyyah’s disappearance.
    “If we can speak for a moment?” he said to them. “Perhaps inside?” He indicated the doors of the hospital. There was a lobby within.
    They agreed to this, and they established themselves in such a way that the light was good on all of their faces, rendering them readable to Lynley as he imparted the information. A car had been found in the Apuan Alps, he said, at the scene of an accident that had apparently occurred a few days earlier, although they wouldn’t know the exact time until a forensic pathologist examined a man’s body that had been near the vehicle. He hastened to add that no child’s body had been at the accident site, but because the car in question matched the description of a car seen parked in a lay-by with a man and a young girl near it, the vehicle was being taken off for study. They would be looking for a child’s fingerprints as well as any other evidence of her presence.
    Angelina nodded numbly. She said, “
Capisco, capisco
,” and then, “I understand. You must need . . .” She didn’t seem able to continue.
    Lynley said, “I’m afraid we do. Her toothbrush, her hairbrush, anything to give us a DNA sample. The police will want to dust for her fingerprints, perhaps in her bedroom, so comparisons can be made.”
    “Of course.” She looked at Azhar and then away, out of the window where Italian cypresses shielded the car park from view and a fountain bubbled on a square of gravel with benches on all four of its sides. “What do you think?” she said to Lynley. “What do they think . . . the police?”
    “They’ll be checking into everything about the man whose body was there.”
    “Do they know . . . Can they tell . . . ?”
    “He had identification with him,” Lynley said. And here was the important part, their reactions when he said the name. “Roberto Squali,” he told them. “Is that name familiar to any of you?”
    But there was nothing. Just three blank faces and an exchange of looks between Lorenzo and Angelina as they asked each other nonverbally if this was a person either of them knew. As for Azhar, he repeated the name. But it seemed more an effort to commit it to memory than an attempt to appear in the dark about who this man was.
    Whatever came next, it would be from police work on the part of the Italian force, Lynley reckoned. Either that or from Barbara’s uncovering something in London.
    They would all have to wait.

29 April
    LUCCA
    TUSCANY
    F
orse quarantotto ore
.” Over the telephone Dr. Cinzia Ruocco gave Salvatore Lo Bianco the information in her usual manner when speaking to a male: on the border between rude and angry. She didn’t like men, and who could blame her? She looked like a young Sophia Loren, and because of this she’d suffered men’s lusting after her body for a good twenty-five of her thirty-eight years. Whenever Salvatore saw her, he lusted after her as well. He liked to think he was good at keeping his thoughts off his face, but the medical examiner had antennae attuned to the slightest mental image that might pop up in the head of any male who gazed upon her bounteous physical virtues. This was one of the reasons she preferred to do things by phone. Again, who could blame her?
    Forty-eight hours, Salvatore thought. Where had Roberto Squali been heading, then, forty-eight hours ago when his car had flown off the road and his life had ended? Was he drunk? he asked Cinzia Ruocco. He was not, she replied. Not drunk and, barring toxicology reports which would be weeks in coming, not impaired in any way. Except, she added, in the way of all men who think ownership of a fast sports car makes them more masculine than owning something sensible. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn this fool had possession of a motorcycle as well. Something huge, she said, to take the place of what—she was happy to