Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

food—the man was, after all, solicitous of her condition because of the pregnancy—but he couldn’t come up with how he’d got the stuff in the first place . . . until he remembered the man he’d seen at the
fattoria
when he’d first called there.
    What had Lynley seen? A thick envelope handed from this unnamed man to Lorenzo Mura. What had Lorenzo declared? It was payment for one of the donkey foals he raised on the premises.
    But what if that man had brought something other than money? Any possibility was one worth pursuing. Lynley picked up the phone and rang Salvatore Lo Bianco.
    He had much to tell him anyway: He began with St. James’s visit to Taymullah Azhar’s lab, and he ended with the mystery man handing over an envelope to Lorenzo Mura at Fattoria di Santa Zita
.
    “Mura claimed it was cash for one of his foals. I thought nothing of it at the time, but if there’s actually no
E. coli
in Taymullah Azhar’s laboratory in London—”
    “There is no
E. coli
now,” Salvatore replied. “But he would, of course, have no need of it now, would he,
Ispettore
?”
    “I see that. He’d have had to be rid of whatever was left—if indeed there was any left—when he returned to London, having already managed to get Angelina to ingest whatever he’d taken to Italy. But here’s something else to consider, Salvatore. What if Angelina was not the intended victim?”
    “Who, then?” Salvatore asked.
    “Perhaps Azhar?”
    “How was he to ingest this
E. coli
?”
    “If Mura gave him something . . . ?”
    “That he gave no one else? How would that have looked, my friend? ‘Eat this
panino
, signore, because you look hungry’? Or ‘Try this especial
salsa di pomodoro
on your pasta’? And how did he put his hands on
E. coli
? And
if
he put his hands on it, how would he poison the professor but have no one else affected?”
    “I think we must find the man with the donkeys,” Lynley said.
    “Who does what? Brew
E. coli
in his bathtub? Notice it crawling round the droppings of a cow or two? My friend, you try to bend what you’ve seen to fit what you hope. You forget Berlin.”
    “What about it?”
    “The conference that our microbiologist attended there. What was to prevent someone passing along to him a bit of this bacteria at the conference?”
    “That was in April. She died weeks later.”
    “
Sì
, but he has a lab, does he not? He keeps it there . . . however it is kept: warm, cold, boiling, freezing. I do not know. He labels it as something, I do not know what. But as you say, he is the head of this lab so no one is likely to bother anything labelled with the professor’s own writing. When it comes time to use it, he takes it with him to Italy.”
    “But this presupposes he knew everything from the first: that Hadiyyah would be kidnapped, that Angelina would come in search of her, that he himself would go to Italy . . . If he’d been wrong about anything—especially about any move made by any of the principals—the plan would have crumbled.”
    “As it has done,
no
?”
    Lynley had to admit there was truth in this. He asked Salvatore what was next, although he had a feeling he already knew.
    “I will pay a call upon the good professor. And in the meantime, I will have officers look into the work of all the people who attended that April conference in Berlin.”
    LUCCA
    ITALY
    Salvatore decided not to have Taymullah Azhar come to the
questura
. He knew how quickly word would filter back to Piero Fanucci that he had done this. And while a conversation with the London professor had not been forbidden to him, he wanted any reports of what he did to go nowhere until he had more information. Once he’d directed Ottavia and Giorgio to look into the attendees at the Berlin conference, he set off for the
anfiteatro
. On his way, he phoned the London professor and told him in his very bad English to phone his
avvocato.
    They were waiting for him in the breakfast room of the
pensione
when Salvatore arrived. He asked where the child was. Had she gone back to Scuola Dante Alighieri?
    She had not, he was told. After all, Azhar was anticipating a quick end to whatever matter had caused Salvatore to request his passport. Once clarity had been reached in this matter, they would depart as soon as they could. Sending her to school . . . ? This did not seem a reasonable idea since they would be leaving Italy so shortly.
    Salvatore suggested two things at that point. The first was that adequate care