Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

taken. The twin sister said, “I’m sorry how it’s ended. You should have given her the only thing she wanted. I expect you know that now,” and she walked off as well.
    Soon enough Salvatore alone remained at the gravesite with Taymullah Azhar and his daughter. He wished that little Hadiyyah did not have to hear what he was going to say. Certainly she had already heard enough for one day, and she didn’t need to know the various ways in which her father was under suspicion.
    “There are some things you need to know, Salvatore” was how Cinzia Ruocco had put it to him as they sat in Piazza San Michele. “In this woman’s gut was something very strange. No one yet wishes to talk about it, but we call it a biofilm.”
    “What is this, then? Is it something that harms?”
    “An aggregate of bacteria,” she said, and she used her hand in a cupping motion as if to demonstrate. “A collection of it that was most unexpected. It was . . . Salvatore, it was highly evolved. It should not have been there in her gut. And I must tell you this, my friend. It is nowhere else. And it should be.”
    He was confused. It should not have been there in her gut. It was not elsewhere, yet it should have been. What kind of medical riddle was this? He said, “She did not die of kidney failure, then?”
    “
Sì, sì
, she did. But it was triggered.”
    “By this . . . what did you call it?”
    “A biofilm. But no, the biofilm—this thing in her gut—it
began
the process. But a toxin killed her.”
    “She was poisoned, then.”
    “She was poisoned,
sì.
Just not in the way her doctors would immediately recognise because, you see, she had already been ill. It was very clever. Someone was either very lucky to kill her in this way, or someone had thought of everything. Because, you see, in the normal course of events, it would be assumed that her death was natural, especially since she had been so ill from the pregnancy. But nothing about this death was natural. It was a chain reaction, as inevitable as knocking dominoes over.”
    Which left Salvatore with the job he had to do now. He approached Taymullah Azhar to do it.
    CHALK FARM
    LONDON
    Barbara kept watch. Once she arrived home at the end of her workday, she went immediately to Azhar’s flat. His intention had been to return to London directly after Angelina’s funeral, bringing Hadiyyah with him, all the better to return the little girl to the environment she’d known for all of her life save for the past few months. But he had not yet arrived.
    She wasn’t concerned at first. The funeral had been scheduled for the morning, but there would have been a reception of some sort afterwards, wouldn’t there? People would want an opportunity to express further condolences and to do what they could to suggest to the bereaved that life would go on. After that, Hadiyyah’s things would need to be packed, if they weren’t already, and the drive to Pisa would have to be made. Then there was the wait at the airport and the flight itself, and of course she shouldn’t have expected them before evening at the earliest.
    But evening came and went and darkness fell, and still Azhar and Hadiyyah did not return. Again and again, Barbara left her bungalow to pace to the front of the building, thinking that they had returned without letting her know for some reason. Finally, at half past nine, she rang Azhar’s mobile.
    “How did it go?” she asked him. “Where are you?”
    “Still in Lucca,” he said. He sounded exhausted as he added, “Hadiyyah is asleep.”
    “Ah. I did wonder . . . I expect it was too much for her, wasn’t it?” Barbara said. “Everything that’s happened and then the funeral and on top of that a flight to London? I didn’t think of that. I won’t keep you, then. You must be all done in as well. When you get back to town, we c’n—”
    “He took my passport, Barbara.”
    A fist gripped her heart. “Who? Azhar, what’s happened?”
    “Chief Inspector Lo Bianco. It was after the . . . her burial.”
    “He was there?” Barbara knew only too well what it meant when the coppers went to the funeral of someone with whom they were not personally involved.
    “Yes. At the church and then at the cemetery. This is where . . . Barbara, Hadiyyah was with me. She did not hear him as he took me aside, but she will wonder why we do not leave in the morning. What am I to tell her?”
    “Why does he want your passport? Never mind. What a bloody stupid