Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

years.
    “He is not a bad boy,” Signora Medici avowed to Salvatore, less with passion than with the habit of repetition. “It is just that . . . for Roberto . . .” She glanced at her husband. It seemed a wary look.
    He went on. “
Vuole una vita facile
” was how the signore put it. And to Roberto, the easy life had been defined as working as little as possible since there were pickings aplenty in their society and he’d been determined from childhood to be ready with a basket whenever something was hanging low enough on the tree. When he worked at all, it was as a waiter in one fine restaurant or another, either in Lucca or in Pisa or occasionally in Firenze. Charming as he was, he never had trouble finding employment. Keeping it, however, had always been another matter.
    “We pray for him,” Signora Medici murmured. “Since he is fifteen years old, all of us pray that he will perhaps grow into a man like his father or like his brother.”
    The fact that Roberto had a brother was a subject worth exploring, but the topic was dispatched fairly quickly. Cristoforo Squali, as things turned out, was the blue-eyed boy in the family, an
architetto
in Rome, married three years, and producing a grandchild for his proud parents eleven months after the I dos were said. With another child on the way, he was everything Roberto was not, this Cristo. He’d never put a foot wrong since the day of his birth. While Roberto . . . ? Signora Medici crossed herself. “We pray for him,” she repeated. “Weekly novenas, his mother and I. But God has never heard our prayers.”
    Salvatore told them, then, about the location of their nephew’s accident. They appeared to know little enough about his doings in Tuscany, but there was a chance that his trip into the Apuan Alps would trigger in them a memory of a conversation with him, the casual mention on his part of a friend, an associate, or an acquaintance who lived there. He did not tell them that Roberto was involved in some way in the disappearance of the English girl that had been reported in the newspapers and on the television. Telling them that would put them all on the fast track to family secrecy, considering Roberto’s hushed-up brush with the law in Rome.
    Salvatore didn’t expect them to know much about what Roberto had been doing in the Apuan Alps. He was surprised, then, when Signora Medici and her husband looked at each other in what appeared to be consternation when he told them where their nephew’s car had been found. The air among them fairly crackled with tension as the signora repeated, “
Le Alpi Apuane?
” As she spoke, her husband’s face hardened on an expression that mixed loathing and fury equally.
    “
Sì
,” Salvatore said. If they had a
carta stradale
of Tuscany, he could show them approximately where their nephew’s car had been found.
    Signora Medici looked at her husband. Her glance seemed to ask him if they even
wanted
to know more at this point. They were worried about something, Salvatore concluded, perhaps trying to decide if they preferred to remain in ignorance about Roberto’s activities.
    Signor Medici made the decision for them both. He pushed himself to his feet and told Salvatore to come with him into the house. Salvatore followed him through an open doorway shielded from bugs by strips of plastic. This gave way into a large kitchen floored in well-scrubbed terracotta tiles. “
Aspetti qui
” told Salvatore that he was to wait, and the signore vanished through another doorway to a darkened part of the house while his wife went to the stove and from a shelf above it took a large Moka into which she began to spoon coffee. This seemed more something to do with her hands than an offer of hospitality since once she added water and put the Moka onto the flame of the
fornello
, she promptly forgot all about it.
    The signore returned with a dog-eared road map of all of Tuscany. He spread it out upon a deeply dented chopping block that was a central feature of the kitchen. Salvatore studied it, trying to recall at what exact point the final turnoff appeared on the route to the accident site. With his finger he traced the route he and DI Lynley had taken. He got as far as the first turn they’d made off the main road when Signora Medici gave a whimper and her husband muttered a curse.
    “
Che cosa sapete?
” Salvatore asked them. “
Dovete dirmi tutto
.” For it was obvious to him that they did know more than they wished to