Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

know, Miko,” he explained as he opened the file and began to place the photographs on the table. “This wretched man”—and here he set before the Pisan three photos of Roberto Squali where he had been found, forty-eight hours dead in the open air of the Apuan Alps—“is the same as this man.” And here he showed him two enlargements taken from the tourist photos: Roberto Squali standing behind the missing English girl and Roberto Squali having in his hand a greeting card that appeared to be later in the hand of the girl.
    Di Massimo glanced at these, and as he did so, Salvatore reached over and removed his sunglasses. Di Massimo flinched and demanded them returned. An “
un attimo
” from Salvatore told him that all things—good, bad, and indifferent—would come quite soon.
    “I do not know this man,” Di Massimo said, folding his leather-clad arms across his chest.
    “You have hardly looked at the pictures, my friend.”
    “I do not need to look more closely to tell you I have no idea who he might be.”
    Salvatore nodded thoughtfully. “Then you will wonder, Michelangelo, why he took so many phone calls from you in the weeks preceding the kidnap of this girl”—he indicated Hadiyyah—“and why he made such a large deposit of cash to his bank account once she went missing. It is a small matter, you know, for us to discover if the amount of this deposit mirrors a withdrawal from your own reserves. That is being arranged, in fact, even as we speak.”
    Michelangelo said nothing, but along his hairline, minuscule drops of perspiration appeared.
    “I’m still waiting for the name of your
avvocato
, by the way,” Salvatore added graciously. “He will want to advise you on the best manner in which to extricate yourself from the web you’re caught in.”
    Di Massimo said nothing. Salvatore let him think. The Pisan would have no way of knowing exactly how much information the police had at this point, but the fact that he’d been brought to the
questura
was going to suggest that his trouble was deep. Since he’d already denied knowing a man to whom he’d made numerous telephone calls, his best move would be to tell the truth. Even if he’d phoned Squali a dozen times without ever having seen the man, the police still had a connection between them and this had to be explained away somehow. Salvatore’s only question was how fast Di Massimo could cook up an explanation that had nothing to do with Hadiyyah’s disappearance. He was betting that anyone who bleached his normally black hair the colour of
mais
was not someone who was also fast on his intellectual feet.
    It turned out that his surmise was correct. Di Massimo said, “
Bene
,” on a sigh. And he began to tell his tale.
    He was hired to find the child, as he had earlier admitted when the chief inspector had questioned him, no? He was hired, he found her, and he’d thought no more of the matter once he had reported her whereabouts at Fattoria di Santa Zita in the hills above Lucca. But some weeks later another, altogether different request had been made for his services. And this request was in relation to the very same child.
    “What were these services?” Salvatore asked.
    The orchestration of her kidnapping, he replied baldly. It was up to him to decide where this kidnapping would occur. The key to it, though, had to be the child’s complete lack of fear. So he set about hiring someone to watch the family in order to find if there was anything they did that could serve the purpose of spiriting her away: something that was so much a part of their regular routine that they would never imagine anything untoward could happen to the child in the midst of it and, thus, their guard would be down. The person he hired was Roberto Squali, whom he knew as a
cameriere
at a restaurant in Pisa.
    The family’s weekly trips to the
mercato
in Lucca, as reported by Squali, proved to be the event he was looking for. The child’s mother went off to yoga, her lover and her daughter went into the
mercato
, and there the child and the man separated so that she could watch the accordion player and his poodle. That constituted the perfect moment to snatch her, Di Massimo had concluded, but of course the snatching could not be carried out by someone as memorable in appearance as the Pisan private detective. Hence, he’d instructed Roberto Squali to carry it out.
    “The child appears to have gone with Roberto willingly,” Salvatore said. “She seems