Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

church’s south side. So the piazza was crowded both with visitors to Lucca and with Lucchese searching for bargains among the cheap clothes. His meeting with Cinzia would thus be unnoticed, which was important to Salvatore.
    He had been informed of the sudden death of Angelina Upman by Lorenzo Mura in the late evening of the previous day. The man had turned up at Torre Lo Bianco—it was hardly a secret where Salvatore lived—and had charged up the stairs to the very top of the tower when Salvatore’s mamma had pointed the way. Salvatore was enjoying his regular evening’s
caffè corretto
when pounding footsteps on the stairs to his aerie caused him to turn from his view of the city.
    Mura was a man deranged. At first, Salvatore had no idea what he was talking about. When he cried out, “She’s dead! Do something! He killed her!” and raised his hands to beat upon his temples as he wept, Salvatore had only stared at him in incomprehension. His first horrified thought was of the child.
    He said, “What? How?”
    Lorenzo crossed the tower to him and grabbed his arm in a grip that crushed his sinews right to the bone. “He did it to her. He would stop at nothing to have the child back. Do you not see? I know he has done this.”
    At that, Salvatore knew what he should have known the moment Lorenzo had come into his view. He was speaking of Angelina. Somehow Angelina Upman had died, and Mura’s grief was unmanning him.
    But how was it even possible that the woman had died? he asked himself. To Lorenzo, he said, “
Si sieda, signore
,” and he led him to one of the wooden benches that sided the large square planter in the centre of the roof. “
Mi dica
,” he murmured, and he waited for Lorenzo to calm himself enough to tell him what had happened.
    She had become weak, Mura told him. She had become lethargic. She could not eat. She would not move from the loggia. She kept declaring she would soon enough be well. She kept promising that she needed only to regain her strength after the terrible ordeal when Hadiyyah had been missing. And then she could not be awakened from an afternoon
pisolino
. An ambulance was called. She died the next morning.
    “He did this to her,” Lorenzo cried. “
Do
something, for the love of God.”
    “But, Signor Mura,” Salvatore had said, “how could anyone be involved in this, let alone the professor? He is in London. He has been there for days. Tell me what the doctors are saying.”
    “What does it matter what they say? He fed her something, he gave her something, he poisoned her, he poisoned our water, it all took time so that she would die after his departure to London.”
    “But, Signor Mura—”
    “No!” Mura shouted. “
Mi senta! Mi senta!
He pretends to reach peace with Angelina. This is easy for him because already he has killed her and what he’s given her resides within her, waiting . . . just waiting . . . And when he’s gone, she dies and this is what happened, and you must do something.”
    So Salvatore promised he would explore what had happened. Cinzia Ruocco was his first step. A sudden death such as this . . . There would be an autopsy. Angelina Upman had been under the care of a doctor,
sì
, but this care had been for her pregnancy and that doctor certainly would sign no certificate declaring that one of his patients had died of pregnancy. So he would meet with and speak to Cinzia Ruocco, the medical examiner.
    Now, Salvatore stood when he saw Cinzia approaching through the crowded piazza. God, he thought in his usual response to the sight of her, such a beautiful woman to be carving up bodies, such a heart beating within her magnificent chest. She was the kind of woman willing to mar her own beauty and then to display the result of that marring for all to see, as she did now. She wore a sleeveless dress so the scars from the acid she’d poured down her arm were fully displayed. These had spared her from the marriage that her father had insisted she make in Naples. She never spoke of this, but Salvatore had looked into her past and her family’s connection to the Camorra. It had been a simple matter to learn that Cinzia Ruocco allowed no person other than herself to dictate her fate.
    Salvatore raised a hand so that she would see him. She nodded briskly and strode to join him, oblivious to those whose stares went from the perfection of her face and her figure to the terrible disfigurement of her arm. She’d spared her hand when she’d used