Inspector Lynley 18 - Just One Evil Act

her fingers, and she watched in horror as it launched towards the tiled floor, where it lost its battery and whoever had been ringing her. She cursed, grabbed a towel, rescued the mobile, and put it back together. She looked to see who the caller had been. She recognised Mitchell Corsico’s number. She rang him back at once, sitting on the loo and dripping water onto the floor.
    “What’ve you got?” she asked.
    “Good morning to you too” was his reply. “Or I s’pose I should say
bone jorno
.”
    “You’re in Italy?” she asked. Thank
God
. The next step was moulding the story he would write.
    “Let’s put it this way:
Il grande formaggio
—that would be Rodney Aronson over in Fleet Street, by the way—wasn’t exactly chuffed to cough up the funds to get me here, so my expense account is large enough for one slice of
focaccia
and a cup of espresso each day. I have to sleep on a park bench—praise God there’re dozens of them up on the city wall, at least—unless I spring for a hotel room myself. But other than that, yeah, I’m in Italy, Barb.”
    “And?” she said.
    “And the good professor spent part of yesterday at the local nick. They call it a
questura
here, by the way. He was there with his solicitor in the afternoon, and they left for dinner, which made me think things might not be what they seemed. But then he was back with the same bloke in tow, and in they went for another few hours. I tried to have a word with him in the afters, but he wasn’t giving.”
    “What about Hadiyyah?” Barbara asked him anxiously.
    “Who?”
    “His
daughter
, Mitchell. The one who was kidnapped? Where is she? What’s happened to her? He can’t have left her all alone for a day in some hotel room while he talked to the cops.”
    “P’rhaps not. But the way things are looking, Barb, he sure as hell did something and he surer as hell doesn’t want to have a chat about it with me. No one has a whisper about
E. coli
, by the way. There’s four journalists I’ve run into—these’re Italians as I’m the only Brit mad enough to be here—and they speak good English
and
they haven’t heard a word about
E. coli
. So I’m going to lay something out for you here. This
E. coli
business: truth or lie? I mean, I’ve had a think in the last twenty-four, and it seems to me you’re not above sending your best mate Mitchell on a wild-goose chase for your own reasons. You’re not doing that, are you? Better reassure me or things won’t look good for you.”
    “Aside from all of that being rubbish on a scone, you’ve already printed those pictures of me, Mitchell. What else can you do?”
    “Print them up with the dates on them this time round, darling. Send them off to your guv and see what happens next. Hey, you and I know you’ve been working this situation from every wrong angle because you and the professor—”
    “Don’t bloody go there,” she said. It was bad enough she’d had to go there with Lynley. She had no intention of entertaining her supposed love for Azhar as a subject with Mitch Corsico. “The
E. coli
story is solid. I told you that much. I had it from DI Lynley. I was sitting right at his dining room table when he got it
and
he got it directly from Italy from a bloke called Lo Bianco.
Chief
Inspector
Salvatore Lo Bianco. He’s the cop who—”
    “Yeah, yeah. I know who he is. Pulled from the kidnapping case for incompetence, Barb. Did Lynley tell you that? I reckon not, eh? So this Lo Bianco drops a fanciful word about
E. coli
as a bit of you-know-what.”
    “Revenge for being pulled from the kidnapping case? A way to muddy the waters? Don’t be stupid. And the
E. coli
business has nothing to do with the kidnapping anyway. It’s a separate issue. The Italians don’t want it hitting the press. That’s your story so bloody go after it. You can’t think Azhar’s been questioned for hours because of a kidnapping that everyone knows he had no part in. They have someone under arrest for the kidnapping, for the love of God. Far as I know, they’ve got two blokes under arrest for it. This is another issue and the last thing the Italians want is for the information to get out. It panics people. No one buys Italian. Their exports get held for testing and the veg rots in port and the fruit goes soft. ’F they pin the
E. coli
business on a single person—which, believe me, they’re intent on doing come hell or you-know-what—they don’t have to worry. They call it murder