Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

to have taken directions from him because she left the
mercato
on a route she’d never taken before and he followed her. There is a witness to this.”
    Di Massimo nodded. “Again, there was to be no fear. I gave him a word to say to her that would reassure her she had nothing to worry about.”
    “A word?”
    “
Khushi
.”
    “What sort of word is this?”
    “A word I myself was given. What it means I do not know.” Di Massimo went on to say that Roberto was to tell Hadiyyah that he had come to take her to her father. He supplied Squali with a greeting card that he had been told her father had written to her. Roberto was to hand her this card and then to say this magic word
khushi
, which appeared to be some kind of
open sesame
to garner her complete cooperation. Once he had her in his company, he was to take her to a place that was safe, where she would not feel herself in any danger. There she would stay until the word came to Michelangelo that the child was to be released. With that word would also come the location of her release. He would pass this information along to Roberto Squali, who would fetch the girl, take her to the drop-off point, and leave her there for whatever was going to happen next.
    Salvatore felt a wave of nausea. “What,” he asked evenly, “was to happen next?”
    Di Massimo didn’t know. He only received bits and pieces of the plan when and as he needed to know them. And that was how it had worked from the first.
    “Whose plan was this, then?” Salvatore asked.
    “I’ve already said. A man from London.”
    Lynley stirred in his chair. “Are you saying that from the first, a man from London hired you to kidnap Hadiyyah?”
    Di Massimo shook his head. No, no, and no. As he’d told them before, he had been hired first merely to find the child. It was only after she had been found that he was then later asked to arrange for her kidnapping. He hadn’t wanted to do it—a
bambina
should never be separated from her mamma,
vero
? But when he’d been told about how this particular mamma had once abandoned this same child for a year to chase after a lover . . . This was not right, this was not good, this was not the
comportamento
of a good mamma, no? So he had agreed to snatch the child. For money, of course. Which, by the way, he had not yet received in full. So much for trusting the word of a foreigner.
    “This foreigner was . . . ?” Lynley asked.
    “Dwayne Doughty, as I’ve said from the first. The plan from start to finish was his. Why he wanted the child to be taken instead of merely reunited with her papà . . . ? This I do not know and I did not ask.”
    VILLA RIVELLI
    TUSCANY
    Sister Domenica Giustina was harvesting strawberries when she was summoned. She was using scissors to cut the fruit from the plants. She was humming an Ave that she particularly liked, and its sweet air moved her among her plants with a lightness of gait that she hadn’t known in all the time she had been in this place.
    Her long period of punishment was ended. She’d bathed and clothed herself anew, using upon her many wounds an ointment she herself had made. These wounds would cease their suppurating soon. Such were the loving ways of God.
    When she heard her name called, she rose from the strawberries. She saw that a novice had come from the convent, the fresh breeze stirring her pure white veil. Sister Domenica Giustina recognised the young woman, although she did not know her name. A badly repaired cleft palate had left her face uneven, giving her the appearance of permanent sorrow. She was no more than twenty-three years old. That she was at this age a novice in the order of nuns spoke to how long she had lived among them.
    She said, “You’re wanted inside, Domenica. You’re to come at once.”
    Sister Domenica Giustina’s spirit leapt like a doe within her. She had not been inside the holy body of the convent in years, not since the day she’d learned she would not be allowed to live among the good sisters who were immured in sanctity there. She’d only been permitted a few steps inside the kitchen on the
pianoterra
. Five paces from the door to the huge pine table where she left for the nuns whatever she’d gleaned from the garden, made from the milk of the goats, or gathered from the chickens. And even then she entered only when no one else was present. That she knew this particular nun—her summoner—by her appearance was owing to having seen her arrive in the company of