Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

of some sort, as people do. They gave her a course of antibiotics as a precaution. And that’s what killed her.”
    “
Antibiotics
killed her? But you said
E. coli
. . . ?”
    “It was both. Evidently with
E. coli
—at least with this strain of it, as far as I can tell from what Salvatore said—antibiotics cause a toxin to be produced. Shiga, it’s called. It finishes off the kidneys. By the time the doctors realised from Angelina’s symptoms that her kidneys were going, it was too late to save her.”
    “Bloody hell.” Barbara took this all in, and what seeped slowly into her consciousness was the fact that her body was relaxing for the first time in twelve hours and her mind was chanting, Thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God. Food poisoning ultimately leading to death, as unfortunate as it was, did not mean . . . what she did not want it to mean.
    She said, “It’s over, then.”
    Lynley gazed at her long before he said, “Unfortunately, it isn’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “No one else is ill.”
    “But that’s good, isn’t it? They dodged the—”
    “No one, Barbara. Anywhere. Not at Fattoria di Santa Zita—that’s the land Lorenzo Mura owns—not in any surrounding village, and not anywhere in Lucca. No one, as I said. Anywhere. Not in Tuscany. Nor in the rest of Italy. Which is one of the reasons the doctors didn’t recognise what they were dealing with immediately.”
    “Should I be following this?”
    “When
E. coli
’s involved, it’s generally referred to as a breakout. Do you see what I mean?”
    “I see that this was an isolated case. But like I said, that’s good, isn’t it? That means . . .” And then she indeed saw what it meant, as clearly as she saw Lynley regarding her. Her mouth went dry. She said, “But they’d be checking
everywhere
for the source, right? They’d have to do that to prevent anyone else from getting infected. They’d be looking at everything Angelina ate and . . . Are there animals at this
fattoria
place?”
    “Donkeys and cows, yes.”
    “Could the
E. coli
have come from them? I mean, don’t animals pass this stuff on in some way? Aren’t we talking about . . . you know . . .”
    “Evidently cattle are a reservoir for the bacteria, and it passes through their system. Yes. But I don’t believe there will be evidence of
E. coli
at Fattoria di Santa Zita, Barbara. Neither does Salvatore.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because no one else who ate there is ill. Hadiyyah, Lorenzo, even Azhar in the immediate days after Hadiyyah was found.”
    “So maybe it’s . . . Does it incubate or something?”
    “I’m vague on the details, but the point is someone there would have fallen ill by now.”
    “Okay. Let’s say she went for a walk. Let’s say she got too near to a cow. Or let’s say she . . . P’rhaps she got it somewhere else. In town. At the marketplace. Visiting a friend. Picking something up off the road.” But even Barbara could hear the desperation in her voice, so she knew Lynley would clock it, as well.
    “We go back to no one else being ill, Barbara. We go back to the strain itself.”
    “What about the strain?”
    “According to Salvatore”—with a nod at his mobile phone lying by his plate—“they’ve never seen anything like it. It’s to do with the virulence. A strain this virulent can take out an entire population before they identify its source. But that population falls ill quickly, in a matter of days. The health authorities become involved, and they begin looking at anyone else who might have seen a doctor or ended up in casualty with similar symptoms. But as I said, no one else has been ill. Not before Angelina. Not after Angelina.”
    “I still don’t see how that’s such a bad thing. I don’t see why Azhar’s been detained unless . . .” Again that steady gaze upon her. She read the grim nature of it, but she read something else, and she wanted more than anything in her life not to be able to understand that look. She said lightly, “Oh, I see. They’re keeping Azhar in Lucca because they don’t want him to pass it on to someone else, I expect. If he’s got it in him—like dormant or something—and he brings it back to London . . . I mean, he could be a modern-day Typhoid Mary, eh?”
    The look on Lynley’s face was unchanging. He said, “It doesn’t work that way. It’s not a virus. It’s a bacteria. It’s—if you will—a microbe. A quite dangerous microbe. You do see where this is leading,