Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

Michelangelo Di Massimo would be the name.”
    Streener shook his head, his eyes on the computer’s screen. “Doesn’t seem to be, but this goes back forever. Let me try . . .” He typed. He was fast, using only two fingers but getting the job done. There was nothing on a Michelangelo Di Massimo, he reported. There was nothing, in fact, in Italy at all aside from his landing in Pisa and the name and location of his B & B.
    Thank God was Barbara’s thought when she heard this. Whatever the tickets to Pakistan meant, in this one matter Azhar was clean.
    She’d taken notes throughout, and now she flipped her notebook closed. She made her thanks to Streener and got herself out of his office and into the nearest stairwell, where she lit a fag and took five deep drags. A door opened some floors below her and voices floated upward as someone began climbing. Hastily, she crushed the fag out, put the dog end in her bag, and ducked back into the corridor, where she was making for the lifts when her mobile rang.
    “Page five, Barb,” Mitchell Corsico said.
    “Page five what?”
    “That’s where you’ll find yourself and the Love Rat Dad. I tried for page one, but while Rod Aronson—that’s my editor, by the way—liked this new twist of the Love Rat Dad having it off with an officer from the Met, he wasn’t exactly impassioned by it since there’s nothing fresh on the kid’s disappearance that I c’n give him from over here. So he’s putting it inside. Page five. You got lucky this time.”
    “Mitchell, why the hell are you doing this?”
    “We had an agreement. Quarter of an hour. That was . . . how many hours ago exactly?”
    “It might interest you that I’m working, Mitchell. It might interest you to know that I’m about to break this case wide open. It might be a grand idea for you to stay on my good side because when the story’s ready for—”
    “You should have told me, Barb.”
    “I don’t report to you, in case you haven’t noticed. I report to my guv.”
    “You should have given me something. That’s how this game is played. And
you
know
that
. If you didn’t want to play, you shouldn’t have climbed into my sandbox. D’you understand?”
    “I’m
going
to give you . . .” The lift arrived. It was filled to capacity. She couldn’t continue the conversation. She said, “We c’n sort this out. Just tell me that there’re no dates involved, and we’re back in business.”
    “On the pictures, you mean? Are the dates removed from the pictures?”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    “And can I guess why that’s important to you?”
    “Oh, I expect you can work that one out. Are you going to answer me?”
    There was a moment. She was in the lift and the doors were closing and she was in terror that either he wouldn’t reply or they’d be cut off.
    But he finally said, “No dates, Barb. I gave you that much. We’ll call it a sign of good faith.”
    “Right,” she said as she rang off. They would definitely call it something.
    LUCCA
    TUSCANY
    Hadiyyah wanted Lynley to sit in the back seat of the police car with her, and he was happy to oblige. Lo Bianco phoned ahead to the hospital in Lucca, and he then notified Angelina Upman and Taymullah Azhar that Hadiyyah had been found at a Dominican convent in the Apuan Alps, that she was alive and well, and that she would be at the hospital within ninety minutes for a general exam. If they would be so good as to meet DI Lynley and himself at this location . . . ?
    “
Niente, niente
,” he murmured into the mobile, an apparent brushing off of copious expressions of gratitude from the other end. “
È il mio lavoro, Signora
.”
    In the back seat, Lynley kept Hadiyyah tucked next to him, which seemed to be her preference. Considering the length of time that she’d been held at Villa Rivelli, she did not appear to be the worse for the experience, at least superficially. Sister Domenica Giustina, as Hadiyyah called Domenica Medici, had taken good care of her. Up until the last few days, the child had apparently had the run of the villa’s grounds. It was only in the end that she had become frightened, Hadiyyah said. It was only when Sister Domenica Giustina took her into the cellar to that mouldy, smelly, creepy chamber with the slippery and slimy marble pool in the floor that she had known the slightest bit of terror.
    “You’re a very brave girl,” Lynley said to her. “Most girls your age—most boys as well—would have been